2006-07-01,Joyce W. Warren,Feminism and Multiculturalism: How Do They/We Work Together?,Hardback,9781847180124,24.99,"The question of women’s role in Islam has been increasingly debated in recent years, even within the Muslim diaspora. This book explores cultural pluralities, their effect on women’s lives, and women’s role in questioning and/or shaping their identities. The questions that we are asking in this book about feminism and multiculturalism are questions that are being asked in many communities across the United States and throughout the world. How do feminism and multiculturalism work together? Can multiculturalism coexist with feminist principles? Does respect for cultural traditions take precedence over women’s rights? Should outsiders interfere with traditional cultural practices? How are transplanted cultures affected by or shaped by their transplanting? How do women of color create gender and racial identity in and outside of mainstream American culture? The contributors to this book represent some of the most important voices in this discussion and include Nurah Ammat’ullah, Jane Kramer, Robina Niaz, Manizha Naderi, Katha Pollitt, Madhulika Khandelwal, Eugenia Paulicelli, and Gail Garfield. In this book they are in dialogue with each other, asking questions and responding to questions, giving different perspectives, and providing or attempting to provide answers. If readers do not find all of the answers they are looking for in these pages, they are certain to gain new perspectives on the questions. And sometimes that is the only way to begin to find answers. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007-03-01,Sally Goade,Empowerment versus Oppression: Twenty First Century Views of Popular Romance Novels,Hardback,9781847181398,39.99,"The title of Empowerment versus Oppression: Twenty-First Century Views of Popular Romance Novels comes from the central question evident in popular romance criticism for at least the past thirty years: Are women readers (and writers) oppressed by their commitment to a narrative with an essentially patriarchal, heterosexual relationship at its center, or are they somehow empowered by their ability to create, escape to, and transform the romance narrative into a vehicle for reimagining women’s freedom within relationships? While building on the work of early critics, who provided theories with which to agree, tinker, and argue, these selections add something new to the conversation, whether it be a new perspective from a unique group of readers (we hear from readers in Hong Kong and India), an examination of a particular romance subtype (included are Christian, African-American, and Gothic novels, as well as those set in Las Vegas and the Middle East), or a new way of presenting a critical response (we have a romance novelist’s controversial reflection, a critique of the industry as creative enterprise, an examination of students negotiating with romance, and established critics—including Kay Mussell and Tania Modleski—“rewriting” their favorite romances). ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007-09-01,Priscilla Roberts and He Peiqun,"Bonds Across Borders: Women, China, and International Relations in the Modern World",Hardback,9781847182807,34.99,"At both the theoretical and practical level, the relationship between women, gender, and international relations has become increasingly controversial in recent years. This collection of essays by twenty leading scholars and diplomatic practitioners from China, Hong Kong, the United States, and Great Britain crosses national, disciplinary, cultural, professional, and gender boundaries to approach this subject from a wide variety of comparative perspectives, designed to stimulate further debate and research. On the theoretical front, this volume explores the manner in which women and their contributions are represented within the discipline of International Relations; discusses whether women have unique contributions to make to both the academic study and the conduct of foreign affairs; and makes recommendations as to how women’s concerns and viewpoints might be better incorporated into the field of international relations in both intellectual and practical terms. Moving to the level of practice, chapters on and by assorted women diplomats reflect on the official careers and foreign policy contributions of women—including the first two US female secretaries of state and the first Asian American ambassador—in both China and the United States. Several highlight the career handicaps women diplomats have faced in China, the United States, and Europe alike. A variety of historical and contemporary case studies, the majority of them dealing with foreign women living in China or Hong Kong, also focus on women in nontraditional diplomatic roles, as wives, missionaries, peace activists, reformers, teachers, businesswomen, and journalists. “It is rare that the published record of a conference contributes to the design and definition of a new field of study, but that is the case with this remarkable volume of essays collected and edited by Priscilla Roberts and He Peiqun. Its very first chapter raises the central question: why we should focus on women/gender and IR. The rest of the volume proceeds to answer it brilliantly. There are essays on familiar aspects of the subject—war war and peace—but also on varieties of formal and informal diplomacy. A concluding section outlines future lines of inquiry. This indispensable collection will make it difficult, at the least, to imagine that it is possible to discuss international relations without also discussing gender.” —Marilyn B. Young, Professor, Dept of History, New York University “1. The product of brilliant scholars from three continents, this book looks beyond the veil to tell us about the constructive roles that women play in international relations. 2. Bigots beware! 3. The lesson of this timely and brilliant Shanghai project is that women are beginning to shape our international community, and very possibly for the better.” —Rhodri Jeffreys Jones, Department of History, University of Edinburgh ""This collection of essays, drawn from the first international conference held in China on the role of women in international affairs, offers an intriguing look at the ways women have gained and wielded influence in foreign affairs both formally and informally. These essays, written by historians and political scientists from Australia, China, Great Britain, and the United States, reveal that female social activists, journalists, and diplomats focused world attention anew on human rights and environmental issues, highlighting the degree to which women were disproportionately the victims of wars, illicit crime rings, and environmental disasters. Yet this collection rightly cautions against assuming that women were always more compassionate international actors, noting that women in power often assumed the same belligerent stance as their male counterparts. As administrative positions within foreign ministries opened up to women they also formed a key component of the middle-strata, but even today women remain consistently shut out of high-level diplomatic appointments. These illuminating essays reveal both the achievements and challenges for women who sought to influence the direction of international relations, demonstrating conclusively that one cannot understand the diplomatic history of the twentieth century without understanding the role of women in international affairs.” —Jennifer D. Keene, professor of history, Chapman University, Orange, California USA"" “The essays in this excellent collection explore and elucidate the power and potential of women on the international scene—whether as actors in the public sphere in positions of authority or as private citizens working to shape and improve the policies of the global community. For scholars and practitioners alike who seek to understand how gender and feminist theory offers a new paradigm for the international system, or the degree to which women may serve as agents of peace, or the process by which women in power undergo masculization in order to succeed in a male-dominated world, [Bonds Across Borders] is an essential read and indispensable resource.” —Edward P. Crapol, Pullen Professor, Emeritus, College of William and Mary ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007-09-01,Lauren Rosewarne,"Sex in Public: Women, Outdoor Advertising and Public Policy",Hardback,9781847182746,34.99,"Despite decades of feminist awareness and activism, women continue to be portrayed in outdoor advertising in a limited and sexist manner. The fact that in public space audiences are exposed to such images without choice, renders the issue an important public policy concern. Sex in Public utilises a large outdoor advertising data collection to examine the contemporary outdoor advertising landscape, documenting the routine portrayal of women as thin, white, young and idle. This book examines why such portrayals are concerning for feminists as well as for public policy, and explores the advertising self-regulation systems that facilitate the display of such images. This book criticises sexist outdoor advertising as a form of sexual harassment given that imagery often bearing very strong semblance to pin-ups which would be outlawed in a workplace are readily displayed in public space, reflecting a troublesome public policy double standard. Understanding sexist outdoor advertising as a form of sexual harassment is a new framework that Sex in Public offers to understand, critique and condemn such images. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007-11-01,Patricia Spence Rudden,Singing for Themselves: Essays on Women in Popular Music,Hardback,9781847183453,39.99,"Singing for Themselves: Essays on Women in Popular Music is a fresh look at a topic that has attracted increasing interest in recent years. In this collection, scholars from a number of disciplines look at various artists and movements and come to some new conclusions about the ways in which female artists have contributed to the past four decades of pop, rock, blues and punk. From new looks at major artists Etta James, Laura Nyro and Patti Smith to later figures Ferron, Bjørk, and Melissa Etheridge, these chapters suggest new ways to view—and hear—music that is already part of our culture. Essays on the Indigo Girls, Dixie Chicks and Destiny’s Child prove that the girl-groups tradition is alive and well, but with additional new dimensions, and a three-essay section on Joan Jett and the Riot Grrrls phenomenon sheds new light on their implications for feminist artistic expression. The final piece, an annotated bibliography of academic writing on women in rock, helps make this collection a useful addition to the library of students of popular music, while the solid research and accessibility of the text make this a good choice for the general reader as well as the seasoned scholar. ""If you think that adoration of certain pop music is a guilty pleasure, not worthy of higher intellectual aspirations, then Singing For Themselves offers absolution. It's far from trivial to ponder the Tao of Canadian singer Ferron, the classical allusions of Laura Nyro's lyrics, the postfeminist booty-shaking of Destiny's Child, or the historical milieu that turned Jamesetta Hawkins into blues great Etta James. Reading these essays made me want to go right back to the music - feeling wiser, yes, but also validated in the desire to go as deep as any song or singer can take me."" Michele Kort, author of Soul Picnic: The Music and Passion of Laura Nyro, and senior editor at Ms. magazine ""I've read Singing for Themselves: Essays on Women in Popular Music, and am happy to provide an endorsement. Singing for Themselves is a consistently interesting collection of new essays on women and popular music. The collection is all the more welcome for being so current. It mixes essays on recent phenomena (such as electronic/punk group Le Tigre and the Dixie Chicks' stirring of political controversy) with new perspectives on canonical figures like Patti Smith or Etta James. The essays gathered here are written with clear commitments, but all are marked by care and scholarly rigour. I found the interdisciplinary breadth of Singing for Themselves refreshing; new avenues for research are opened up here, and new theoretical paradigms are explored."" Will Straw, PhD, Acting Director, McGill Institute for the Study of Canada Associate Professor, Department of Art History and Communication Studies ""Opening this book was like opening the door onto a surprise party. Everyone I've ever wanted to meet was in there, including myself!"" Ferron ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007-12-01,Roxanne Harde,Narratives of Community: Womens Short Story Sequences,Hardback,9781847183835,44.99,"Narratives of Community draws together essays that examine short story sequences by women through the lenses of Sandra Zagarell’s theoretical essay, “Narrative of Community.” Reading texts from countries around the world, the collection’s twenty-two contributors expand scholarship on the genre as they employ diverse theoretical models to consider how female identity is negotiated in community or the roles of women in domestic, social and literary community. Grouped into four sections based on these examinations, the essays demonstrate how Zagarell’s theory can provide a point of reference for multiple approaches to women’s writing as they read the semiotic systems of community. While “narrative of community” provides an organizing principle behind this collection, these essays offer critical approaches grounded in a wide variety of disciplines. Zagarell contributes the collection’s concluding essay, in which she provides a series of reflections on literary and cultural representations of community, on generic categorizations of community, and on regionalism and narrative of community as she returns to theoretical ground she first broke almost twenty years ago. Overall, these essays bring their contributors and readers into a community engaged with a narrative genre that inspires and affords a rich and growing tradition of scholarship. With Narratives of Community, editor Roxanne Harde offers a wealth of critical essays on a wide variety of women's linked series of short stories, essays that can be seen overall to explore the genre as a kind of meeting house of fictional form and meaning for an inclusive sororal community. The book itself joins a growing critical community of monographs and essay collections that have been critically documenting the rise of the modern genre of the story cycle to a place second only to the novel. But more than simply joining this critical venture, Narratives of Community makes a major contribution to studies in the short story, feminist theory, women's studies, and genre theory. Its introduction and essays should prove of enduring interest to scholars and critics in these fields, as well as continue highly useful in the undergraduate and graduate classrooms. — Gerald Lynch, Professor of English, University of Ottawa The introduction, by Prof. Harde, and the 20 essays in the book dialogue with Sandra Zagarell’s proposed paradigm “narratives of community”, which other scholars have called “short story cycles” or “story sequences”. Zagarell’s proposal organically blends a generic model with a thematic concern to explain how women writing community often turn to a particular narrative style that itself supports the literary creation of that community. Harde and the volume contributors appropriate this brilliant and engaging proposal in the context of other crucial discussions of the genre—notably Forest Ingram’s germinal study, J. Gerald Kennedy’s work, and those by Robert Luscher, Maggie Dunn and Anne Morris, James Nagel, Gerald Lynch and (I’m honored to note), my own study on Asian American short story cycles—to expand the range of the critical discussion on the form. The quality and diversity of the essays remind us that there is still much work that can be done in the area of genre studies. The volume emphasizes an important caveat to one vital misconception: that although writers like James Joyce or Sherwood Anderson are thought to be the precursors or, even, “inventors” of the form, women’s sequences, by Sara Orne Jewett and Elizabeth Gaskell, among others, actually predate the work of the male writers. This fact suggests that the development of the form as a genre that attends to specific perspectives or creative formulations of and by women needs to be considered in depth. The temporal scope of the volume is therefore a vital contribution to scholarship on the form, as is the diversity of the writers analyzed. Indeed, the examination of narratives by writers from different countries and that focus on characters from different time periods, racial, religious, or ethnic communities, and social class impels a multilayered reading of the texts that inevitably promotes a nuanced understanding of the project of each of the writers, a project that connects issues of individuality and community in varied and often surprising ways. The essays thus critically explore the notion of community in its myriad associations with the individual and as a crucial site not only for women’s action upon the world but also for her creative endeavors. The essays in the volume revisit familiar texts—Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place, Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Welty’s The Golden Apples, Munro’s The Lives of Girls and Women, among others—but offer new perspectives on the way form interacts with issues of women’s communities and women creating community in these works. Significantly, it also offers readings on texts that have not been analyzed in detail from this perspective—Gaskell’s Cranford or Woolf’s A Haunted House, for example—thus contributing to a continuing conversation about the ways women write. The juxtaposition of the familiar and the new expand the paradigms of current criticism not only on the story cycle but also on women’s writing in general. —Rocio Davis, Professor of Literature, University of Navarre ""Roxanne Harde’s forthcoming volume, Narratives of Community: Women’s Short Story Sequences, provides an abundant collection of varied responses to Sandra Zagarell’s longstanding call for further in-depth exploration of the genre that Zagarell christened “the narrative of community” in her 1988 essay linking non-novelistic narrative form with representations of female experience. As Harde observes, such narratives of community overlap significantly with the growing canon of unified but discontinuous collections of autonomous stories that critics have variously labeled as the short story cycle/ sequence/ composite . . . The essays in her collection examine a rich variety of such works by women, extending the scholarship in this area. . . Harde’s ample collection of essays presents a concerted and diverse exploration of the implications of the short story sequence form as a representation of women’s lives as part of and in conflict with membership in a community. . . . Overall, Harde’s volume is a welcome addition to current scholarship on the short story sequence, bringing in a variety of new voices and perspectives to the community of scholars who have engaged in the exploration of this paradoxical, evolving, and increasingly popular genre."" — Dr. Luscher ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-02-01,"Dilek Direnç, Günseli Sönmez İşçi and Klára Kolinská",Women in Dialogue: (M)uses of Culture,Hardback,9781847184504,34.99,"Women in Dialogue: (M)Uses of Culture results from an international symposium held at Ege University, Izmir, Turkey, in 2006, which brought together scholars from over ten countries, and from multiple academic backgrounds, who share professional interest in women’s studies, and, to no less degree, in current women’s realities. The book presents a collection of essays united by a common focus on the position of women as objects of cultural production in different geographic, national, and political contexts, as well as the character and typology of women’s contribution to cultural activity across the ethnic or religious divide marking the face of contemporary world. The volume comprises two sections: the first, titled “Women in Dialogue,” contains contributions which analyze literary representations of women from a variety of perspectives, and from diverse spatial and temporal locations. The second part, titled “(M)Uses of Culture,” includes personalized observations by several women writers, of both poetry and fiction, their commentaries on their own work as artists, and their deeply experienced “musings” on the position of women as artists in the world of today. The essays that this volume brings together are varied in subject matter; yet they are connected by the common theme, epitomized in the metaphor of dialogue, as a platform for active, productive communication, leading – on the pages of the book, if not elsewhere – to learning, and mutual understanding. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-06-01,Margaret C. Wiley,"Women, Wellness, and the Media",Hardback,9781847185754,34.99," As a former nurse and someone who now teaches Women’s Studies, I have long been interested in the politics of health care. Today, most Americans would agree that our health care system is broken. We pay more for health care than any nation in the world, yet in 2007, the World Health Organization ranked us as 37th in quality of health care. Forty-six million Americans are now without health insurance. What is happening here? And just where are all these dollars going? In Women, Wellness, and the Media, thirteen scholars from a wide range of disciplines examine the relationship between media stereotypes and women’s health. They look at several images of women: the perfect mom; the straight, bikini-clad sixteen-year old blond who has been air-brushed to perfection; the wild black Jezebel who struts her stuff; and the shriveled up menopausal crone. The writers point out that these images are making millions of dollars for all sorts of businesses ranging from the pharmaceutical industry to women’s magazines. Scholars have long noted that stereotypes disempower women; in Women Wellness and the Media we see how these stereotypes actually harm women’s health while turning millions in corporate profits. ","“This book is a collection of well-researched essays broad in scope, comprehensive in depth, and written by a diverse group of scholars. It is part reminder of the power media (backed by corporations) had in educating women, a power which continues unchecked today, and part a roadmap to future paths media, women and men can take to change direction. The essays …reveal a sexism, which on the surface seems to promote women’s independence and empowerment; yet, underneath, it actually undermines the power of the individual and the collective female. The essays postulate that the media remain rife with deceptions, which reinforce historical stereotypes and continue to subtly subvert female’s confidence, self respect, autonomy, and health. This collection further links sexism to ageism, racism, classism and homophobia.” --Rebecca L. Johnson, MD Staff Psychiatrist, Dartmouth College Health Service Adjunct Asst Professor of Psychiatry, Dartmouth Medical School Former Ethic Institute Fellow, Dartmouth College ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-08-01,Míchéal Ó hAodha ,Travellers and Showpeople: Recovering Migrant History,Hardback,9781847186362,29.99,"The late-twentieth century has witnessed a particular prominence assigned to the discourses of “difference” and “Otherness”. An examination of this “othering” discourse as related to Travellers, Gypsies and Showpeople ennumerates the projective function of the “Othering” process, a form of rejection and marginalisation that is the institutionalization of ideas which are seldom challenged. The history of Traveller and Gypsy “Othering” in Europe points to the constant re-articulation of reductionist stereotypes as applied to a wide range of nomadic peoples and the creation of a mythic Traveller/Gypsy prototype that is based on a series of endlessly repeated generalizations which gradually assume the status of an objective “truth”. This discourse of representation has culminated in powerful institutional attitudes, many of which have influenced official and policy responses to these minorities. This volume brings to surface the “hidden histories” and discourses of the “peoples of the road”, those migratory peoples whose unique expressions of identity have often hitherto remained occluded. We live in the era of the Other, the era of “difference”, the era of migration - that “stranger” who waits silently at the border crossing, battered suitcase in hand. Travellers and Roma are the archetypal migrants. Perennial “outsiders”, they are the people who have lived on society’s margins for centuries. This volume explores the history of these traditionally migrant peoples within the frame of articulation that is Western literary and visual culture. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-09-01,"Sharon Kay Masters, Judy A. Hayden and Kim Vaz",Florida without Borders: Women at the Intersections of the Local and Global,Hardback,9781847187215,34.99,"Florida without Borders: Women at the Intersections of the Local and Global highlights the problems facing women around the world by featuring papers that explore women’s activism across borders regarding gender and human rights, issues regarding women and poverty, globalization, economic value of immigrant labor, militarism and human trafficking. Also discussed are the opportunities and obstacles women face when they act to counter the negative impact of these forces. This anthology is a collection of essays by feminist scholars and students who examine discourses on border crossings, political and cultural censorship, gendered codes of conduct, prescribed behavior for women and the activism that emerges to address identity formation, to advance contested meanings and to build coalitions. Throughout the essays, the authors investigate the concepts of the gendered body in the context of global activism, the uses of women’s bodies in domestic, military, and sexual service, and the breaching of the body’s borders and boundaries in the project of feminist social change. ","“Florida without Borders: Women at the Intersections of the Local and Global exemplifies an intersection of the call to 'Think globally, act locally' with the feminist claim that 'the personal is political.' This is an engaging and provocative collection that will appeal well beyond the borders of 'Florida' itself—that identity-challenged border state. These essays range widely across geographic regions and transdisciplinary territories—from Tampa and Miami to India and Canada, from the politics of hair-straightening and the 'big butt' to that of the Abu Ghraib photographs, from poetry-interspersed reflection on the 'internalized' globalness of mixed race identity(s) to the political possibilities of a trans-national ethics of care and the economics of women’s labor-practices, from theorizing the Enlightenment heritage of 'human rights' to embodied art-making. Tied together by their timeliness and their concern to link the imminently local or personal with the explicitly global or relational, these essays interact in provocative and innovative ways. This collection will be useful both for interdisciplinary and for traditional disciplinary efforts to engage with and reframe conventional ideas about nationalism and terrorism, raced and gendered identities, feminist art and economics, women’s rights as human rights, and the challenges of multiculturalism across national boundaries. There is something for everyone in this collection, with surprising and enlightening connections in each essay that repay the adventurous reader.” Miriam L. Wallace, Ph.D., Associate Professor, British & American Literature Coordinator, Program in Gender Studies 2003-06 New College of Florida “Florida Without Borders: Women at the Intersection of the Local and Global is a significant contribution to scholarship on gender and globalization. Published by the Florida Consortium of Women’s and Gender Studies, this engaging work contains articles by scholars, activists, and artists who demonstrate how the issues and concerns regarding Florida are simultaneously global concerns. The authors provide an impressive international, multicultural approach to a feminist ethics of care, ecofeminism, the war on terror and torture as seen through the lens of gender, female trafficking, the globalized female body, economic empowerment, and women in fashion and the arts. The essays are groundbreaking and provocative.” - Carolyn Ross Johnston, PhD, Professor of History and American Studies, Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program, Eckerd College ""Florida without Borders: Women at the Intersections of the Local and Global is a unique approach that truly integrates the local and the global, as promised in the title. Local issues are clearly a microcosm of larger societal issues. A wide variety of topics are viewed with attention to race, class and gender, giving voice to the feminisms that help define what “feminism” is today. The need for change is apparent in the writings of this anthology. It would be hard to imagine reading this book without recognizing the need for change and feeling a call to action in both a personal and political context. "" Joyce L. Carbonell, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology, Director of the Women’s Studies Program, Florida State University ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-11-01,Sarah A. Appleton,"Once upon a Time: Myth, Fairy Tales and Legends in Margaret Atwood’s Writings",Hardback,9781847186843,29.99,"While it is often acknowledged that Margaret Atwood's novels are rife with allusions from the oral tradition of myth, legends, fables, and fairy tales, the implications of her liberal usage bear study. The essays in this volume have been written by some of the most influential Margaret Atwood scholars internationally, each exploring Atwood’s use of primal, indeed archetypal, narratives to illuminate her fiction and poetry. These essays interact with all types of such narratives, from fairy tales and legends, to Greek, Roman, Biblical, and pagan mythologies, to contemporary processes of myth and tale creation. And, as the works in this collection demonstrate, Atwood’s use of myths and fairy tales allows for an abundance of old, yet fresh material for contemporary readers. By reconciling, yet by also revisioning, the archetypal motifs, characters, and narratives, Atwood’s writings present a familiar, yet unique, reading experience. ","""Margaret Atwood is on record as saying that Grimm’s Fairy Tales influenced her profoundly, and much scholarly work has already been done on this important aspect of her writing. However, in Once upon a Time, Sarah Appleton has gathered together nine fascinating new essays on Atwood’s use of myth and fairy tales by specialists from Canada, England, Israel, and the United States. This collection offers new perspectives on the function of fairy tale, myth, and legend in Atwood’s earlier work and brings this discussion up-to-date through analyses of recent novels, like The Blind Assassin and Oryx and Crake, and the staging of The Penelopiad. And if readers are curious about the fate of princes and male heroes in Atwood’s hands, then there is an essay here that will get you thinking about them. Every student of Atwood, or of contemporary culture more broadly, will want to read Once upon a Time."" —Sherrill Grace, F.R.S.C., Professor of English and Distinguished University Scholar, The University of British Columbia ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-12-01,Anita Rose,Gender and Victorian Reform,Hardback,978-1-4438-0067-9,34.99,"Gender, in the nineteenth century as now, is an integral part of identity. As a result, gender, along with race and class, has long been a vital part of public discourse about social concerns and reform. The fourteen essays in Gender and Victorian Reform address the overt and subtle ways in which gender influenced social reform in Victorian England. In addition to investigating the more readily apparent instances of gender in the areas of suffrage, women's education, and marriage law reform, the contributors to this collection examine the structure of charitable organizations, the interpretation of language and literacy, ideas of beauty, and religion through the lens of gender and offer diverse approaches to Victorian literature and culture. Some examine specific texts or single canonical authors, others introduce the reader to little-known authors and texts, and still others focus on the culture of reform rather than specific literary texts. Essays are arranged into four parts, with Part I focusing on historical context and a revisioning of the historical romance. Part II addresses more specifically the role of women in public life and in the professions. The essays in Part III look even more specificallyat the connections among reform, gender, literacy and literary genre in Eliot, Collins, and Gaskell. The final four essays offer readings of the impact of gender ideology on beauty, dress, politics and religion. Taken as a whole, the essays in this collection present a serious consideration of the role of gender in art and in public life that spans the Victorian era. Reformist impulses are revealed in a number of Victorian texts that are not generally read as overtly political. In this way, this collection thoughtfully focuses on the influence of gender on a wide range of social movements, and moves the significance of gender beyond simply the content of Victorian fiction and the identity of the authors and into the more fundamental connection of discourse to reform."" ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-12-01,Marianna D’Ezio,Literary and Cultural Intersections during the Long Eighteenth Century,Hardback,978-1-4438-0063-1,29.99,"Culture and literature, indeed intellectual life as a whole, in eighteenth-century Britain were characterized by complex internal tensions as well as influenced by the unprecedented atmosphere of major political, cultural and social change which led to the revolutions at end of the century. Furthermore, the diffusion of periodicals and newspapers, which formed the basis of public conversation in urban coffee-houses, functioned as a vehicle for the dispersion of works which publicly mirrored a private society in the process of transformation. The focus on this change and the circulation of new ideas on taste and polite society as well as on culture and literature can be found in the continual intertwining between the public and the private spheres of society. The aim of the first part of this collection of original, unpublished essays by young international scholars is to investigate the dynamics of these “overlapping” spheres through new readings of eighteenth-century literary works which not only analysed the mechanisms of the private and public spheres, but also highlighted some remarkable cultural features, such as clothing and fashion, gossip and gender issues. As suggested by the title, the second part of the collection will expand on the principal idea of “intersections” in eighteenth-century English literature: from the intersections linking the private and public spheres of British society, to those between eighteenth-century works within the British literary canon, taking into account the influence of European thought. The purpose of the second group of essays is thus that of offering fresh perspectives and a re-evaluation of literary and cultural reciprocal exchanges, in order to better locate or re-locate canonical works and authors within the eighteenth-century literary tradition. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008-12-01,Beth Alpert Nakhai,The World of Women in the Ancient and Classical Near East,Hardback,978-1-4438-0030-3,39.99,"The World of Women in the Ancient and Classical Near East, written by scholars working in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Israel, makes important contributions to our knowledge of the lives of ancient women. Its articles employ archaeology, biblical and other textual studies, ethnographic comparanda and more to investigate women in Egypt and western Asia from the Predynastic to the Byzantine Periods, as well as in England in the Victorian Era. They combat modern scholarship’s marginalization of women in antiquity, proving beyond all doubt that women’s roles in the home, in the workplace and in society at-large were essential for the survival of the family and the community. Locating women within the domestic sphere can no longer be seen to diminish appreciation of their extensive responsibilities and accomplishments. To the contrary, women’s domestic contributions are proven to be essential components of human survival, as are their contributions elsewhere throughout society, in elite royal, religious, and funerary contexts. The nine articles in this book highlight the fact that the traditional scholarly reliance upon dichotomization and compartmentalization must be resisted, and new paradigms developed and adopted. The World of Women in the Ancient and Classical Near East takes important steps in that direction. ","The World of Women in the Ancient and Classical Near East marks a significant step forward in the understanding of the critical importance women played in daily life during antiquity in the eastern Mediterranean. The nine contributions to the volume are offered by established scholars whose expertise informs on the varied roles undertaken by women as they performed activities essential to the survival of the household—certainly the most fundamental and pivotal arena for human interaction during the course of the ancient world. Reflecting diverse methodologies and varied resources, the essays reinforce the primacy of female agency within the home, and the incorporation of archaeology, textual studies, and ethnographic comparanda brings together relevant data that belies long-held traditional beliefs that women’s contributions to social, economic, and political spheres were slight. Masterfully edited by Beth Alpert Nakhai, who has championed the study of gender issues in antiquity, the volume embraces a chronological spread and a geographic diversity that enhances its importance as one that will advance the discourse on the reality of women in the ancient Near East for some time to come. —Dr. Nancy Serwint, Acting Director and Associate Professor, School of Art, Herberger College of the Arts, Arizona State University “This collection of essays is a welcome and important publication--a must-read for everyone interested in the archaeology of Syria-Palestine and the history of women in antiquity. Its highly readable studies provide stunning examples of the way archaeological data can produce otherwise unavailable information about women's lives and even challenge traditional notions of gender dynamics in the ancient and classical Near East.” —Carol Meyers, Mary Grace Wilson Professor, Duke University ""There are a number of articles that are excellent examples of ANE work on women and gender in this volume"" Stephanie L. Budin, Rutgers University, Camden, Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2009.10.60 ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-02-01,Bernadette H. Hyner and Precious McKenzie Stearns,Forces of Nature: Natural(-izing) Gender and Gender(-ing) Nature in the Discourses of Western Culture,Hardback,978-1-4438-0187-4,39.99,"In Forces of Nature, the authors investigate the relationships between the natural world and gender and sexuality. The authors explore the frameworks within which femininity and nature have been constructed, as well as the impact nature has had on our understandings of masculinity, homosexuality, and heterosexuality. For some writers nature has restorative powers, for others nature embodies violence and destruction. Yet, one common thread runs across all of the chapters in this collection: nature and animals can not be separated from the human experience. Forces of Nature brings to light the intimate connection humans have with the natural world and provides students and scholars with innovative readings of both canonical and noncanonical texts. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-02-01,Laura Engel,The Public’s Open to Us All: Essays on Women and Performance in Eighteenth-Century England,Hardback,978-1-4438-0173-7,44.99,"“The Public’s Open to Us All”: Essays on Women and Performance in Eighteenth-Century England considers the relationship between British women and various modes of performance in the long eighteenth century. From the moment Charles II was restored to the English throne in 1660, the question of women’s status in the public world became the focus of cultural attention both on and off the stage. In addition to the appearance of the first actresses during this period female playwrights, novelists, poets, essayists, journalists, theatrical managers and entrepreneurs emerged as skillful and often demanding professionals. In this variety of new roles, eighteenth-century women redefined shifting notions of femininity by challenging traditional representations of female subjectivity and contributing to the shaping of eighteenth-century society’s attitudes, tastes, and cultural imagination. Recent scholarship in eighteenth-century studies reflects a heightened interest in fame, the rise of celebrity culture, and new ways of understanding women’s participation as both private individuals and public professionals. What is unique to the body of essays presented here is the authors’ focus on performance as a means of thinking about the ways in which women occupied, negotiated, re-imagined, and challenged the world outside of the traditional domestic realm. The authors employ a range of historical, literary, and theoretical approaches to the connections among women and performance, and in doing so make significant contributions to the fields of eighteenth-century literary and cultural studies, theatre history, gender studies, and performance studies. ","""'The Public’s Open to Us All: Essays on Women and Performance in Eighteenth-Century’ England' is a valuable resource for scholars and students interested in women studies, performance studies, and British drama. By illuminating the careers of eighteenth-century actresses, authors, and managers, and analyzing modern performances of eighteenth-century works, the essays in this collection reaffirm the importance of eighteenth-century theatre and performance in contemporary culture.” Marilyn Francus, Associate Professor, Department of English, West Virginia University ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-03-01,Maite Escudero-Alías,Long Live the King: A Genealogy of Performative Genders,Hardback,978-1-4438-0216-1,39.99,"Masculinity is no longer a monolithic category, if ever it was. Long Live the King is a solid piece of scholarship that explores in depth the drag king phenomenon as well as key theoretical texts by feminist, postcolonial and cultural thinkers. Maite Escudero-Alías delves into drag king culture and highlights its relevance for the study of the relationship between gender, sex, race and sexuality. Introduced by a well-informed theoretical chapter that traces the roots of queer theory, Long Live the King provides the reader with a rigorous textual and cultural examination of drag kings’ most innovative performances of masculinity in the USA and the UK. These chapters prove groundbreaking in their acute analyses of drag kings’ acts in different media, ranging from still images to live performances, documentaries, mainstream television series and literature. Theory and analysis blend perfectly and Escudero-Alías’s main contention in this research – the ambivalent nature of drag kings’ performances of masculinity – is conducted convincingly. This book constitutes an invaluable contribution to the field of gender studies and a fair assessment of the political impact of minority artistic practices in contemporary culture. ","“Objective without being objectifying, Long Live the King is the first intensive analysis of Drag Kingdom written by a self-admitted 'outsider.' The insights that Escudero-Alías offers into this world of performative masculinities are funneled through the lens of Butlerian feminism, yet tempered by a frank admiration for the Kings and their work. This book offers a unique perspective that complements extant work on Drag Kings and is a must-read for anyone interested in gender performance or female masculinities.” - Sara E. Cooper, Chair, Cuban and Cuban Diaspora Cultural Expression Discussion Group, MLA, Associate Professor of Spanish and Multicultural & Gender Studies, California State University ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-03-01,Karen A. Ritzenhoff and Katherine A. Hermes,Sex and Sexuality in a Feminist World,Hardback,978-1-4438-0236-9,49.99,"Sex and sexuality are topics that have defined feminism since its inception. What has changed is that there is now a generation of feminists and scholars who are comfortable not only to write in their own disciplines but who incorporate feminist ideas in their research. This book assembles a variety of essays, most of which were written especially for this collection, that negotiate sex and sexuality in historical contexts as well as in contemporary times. There is a common ground of history and (popular) culture among the articles. While different theories of feminism operate in these essays, feminist lenses have allowed the reevaluation of familiar topics from early religious practices to medieval literature to current films and advertising. The authors represented in this collection range from established feminist and gender scholars to those who employ feminist theoretical frameworks in their respective disciplines. ","“What does it mean to live in a feminist world? In this collection, Karen A. Ritzenhoff and Katherine A. Hermes suggest that to live in a feminist world is to choose to engage with the vital and dynamic ideals of a political movement that has, in some ways, been superseded or at least put into question by the very world that it has profoundly shaped. How do we articulate these connections between feminist concerns about sex and sexuality and their live enactments in the world? Numerous examples of the complex entanglements of feminist perspectives and aspirations and the world – or what we might better describe as the subsumption of their aspirations into new projects of exploitation – urge new critical interventions not only in our collective efforts to shape the present and the future, but also, towards that end, in our efforts to understand the past. To live in a feminist world is, after all, to engage with the paradoxical consequences of feminist accomplishment as well as to grapple with the unrealized promise of feminist goals.” —Neferti Xina Tadiar is a Professor of Women’s Studies at Barnard College and Director of the Center for Critical Analysis of Social Difference in Columbia University. ""Sex and Sexuality in a Feminist World is a thought provoking read using a variety of topics to address the reciprocal relationship between culture and gender roles. The essays utilize a multidisciplinary lens to highlight the impact of popular culture on challenging norms and shaping gender identities, thus shedding light on inequities and inconsistencies that impact the behavior of men and women in society."" — Cheryl L. Meyer has blended together a unique combination of degrees including a Master’s degree in Clinical Psychology, a Ph.D. in Social Psychology and a law degree. Her research has an interdisciplinary focus incorporating legal, educational, psychological and sociological perspectives. Dr. Meyer has published three books with New York University Press, The Wandering Uterus (1997), Mothers who Kill their Children: Understanding the Acts of Moms From Susan Smith to the 'Prom Mom' (2001), and When Mothers Kill: Interviews from Prison and has recently won the Outstanding book of the year"" award from the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (www.acjs.org). Dr. Meyer is a Professor at Wright State University School of Professional Psychology. ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-04-01,Bruce Drushel and Kathleen German,Queer Identities / Political Realities,Hardback,978-1-4438-0447-9,39.99,"Queer Identities/Political Realities examines the intersection of political leadership, media coverage, and sexual identity with particular emphasis on the negotiation of meaning between public behavior and private behavior in the United States. Centering on cases that illuminate key issues, each chapter questions assumptions about media coverage and extends current theoretical understanding. Each chapter focuses on a specific case within the broader conceptual fabric of queer theory, media theory, or rhetorical criticism. Varied methodological approaches allow us to gauge public discourse of multifaceted controversies that involve same sex behavior. History reveals frequent occasions when private sexual behaviors surface to attract public interest. While the prejudices and discrimination against same-sex partnerships, whether casual or permanent, remain entrenched in United States culture, there have been occasions when the public discussion is riveted on instances. This book argues that public interest changes when the partners in such relationships are of the same sex. The extraordinary public prejudice against same sex unions and public censure has been well documented in other research reports and continues to receive attention in other scholarly publications. This book will examine the unique intersection of political leadership, media coverage, and same-sex behavior. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-06-01,Melissa Purdue and Stacey Floyd,"New Woman Writers, Authority and the Body",Hardback,978-1-4438-0613-8,34.99,"This collection of essays contributes to scholarship on the emerging voices of women writers during the fin de siècle. These “New Woman” writers created a distinctly different body of literature that reflected their concerns about women’s limited role in society. The essays cover a range of authors, shedding light on the ways New Woman texts also often offer new and progressive portrayals of women’s authority as connected to strong physical bodies. These scholars highlight how New Woman endings re-envision the marriage plot, self-destruction and even empowerment through pain. Additionally they help scholars, instructors and students contextualize the New Woman writers in terms of the Women’s Movement, nineteenth-century laws related to marriage, Darwinian theory, athletics for women, the New Woman’s navigation of urban life and even Jack the Ripper. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-07-01,Catherine Kevin,Feminism and the Body: Interdisciplinary Perspectives,Hardback,978-1-4438-0986-3,39.99,"By definition, feminism is concerned with the historical, social and political meanings of sexual difference in the human body, and the spectrum of experiences those meanings produce. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, gendered forms of violence persist, abortion remains a political issue, reproductive and cosmetic technologies and their concomitant ethical questions are proliferating, and the presence of women’s bodies in public spaces and for public consumption produces a range of anxieties about women’s well-being and the common good. Feminist scholars from across the disciplines grapple with these issues in Feminism and the Body. In so doing they continue a history of intellectual endeavor that, for centuries, has striven to identify the interplay between corporeal differences and relationships of power. This collection will take the reader on a journey into myriad domains in which a variety of discursive effects come to life in the embodied subject: from the theatres of medical surgery and law to the discussion fora of sex therapy and marriage guidance experts; from Peruvian villages of the late twentieth century to African American plays of the 1920s and 1930s; from explicitly feminist novels and films to the mainstream press and right into feminist scholarship that theorises the female body. In so doing, this collection restates and reinvigorates feminism’s long-standing, necessary and emphatic engagement with the female body. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-07-01,Amanda du Preez,Taking a Hard Look: Gender and Visual Culture,Hardback,978-1-4438-0982-5,39.99,"It is the aim of this edited volume to take a hard look at gender and visual culture. Gender and visual culture traverse in quite unique and often fascinating ways. On the one hand, gender functions as an interdisciplinary approach and critical tool to analyse and investigate several subject fields. As such, gender contributes to establishing a much-needed theoretical and functional platform spanning across many fields of enquiry from where gender practices can effectively be critiqued and ideally changed. On the other hand, the growing popularity and ubiquity of visual culture in a global context create the increasing need to reflect on and interrogate this phenomenon in an academic manner. Although Visual Culture Studies is an established subject at many Northern institutions, it is fairly new and relatively under-theorised in the South. In response to the growing need to investigate issues dealing with gender and visual culture and particularly how they creatively intersect, this selection of chapters (first presented as papers at the Taking a Hard Look: Gender and Visual Culture international conference, 20-21 June 2007, Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies, University of Pretoria, South Africa) are collected here in the hope to make a purposeful contribution to the burgeoning discourse. However, by addressing the creative intersection between gender and visual culture this edited volume is no novelty. In fact, the topic of gender and visual culture has been addressed over the past decade in several edited volumes. It is in this proud tradition that this book aims to take its place and to create a dialogue with international theory on gender and visual culture studies from a South perspective. Key questions that are explored in the volume: What type of gendered visual culture is being presented and created in the South particularly (but not exclusively)? How is visual culture gendered? Can one refer to a move beyond gender in terms of a trans-gendered visual culture or are we still caught up in the same debilitating role models? How does one address the ever-increasing alienation between gender studies and the younger generation of students and scholars moving into higher education? What is the role of gender as interdisciplinary tool in the academic analysis of visual culture as it spans across several subjects, such as science, social work, technology, psychology, medicine, philosophy, sociology, engineering, communication, economics, religious studies, business management, anthropology, geography, historical studies, cultural and media studies, visual studies, art history and literature studies? ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-08-01,Tudor Balinisteanu,"Narrative, Social Myth and Reality in Contemporary Scottish and Irish Women’s Writing: Kennedy, Lochhead, Bourke, Ní Dhuibhne, and Carr",Hardback,978-1-4438-1127-9,44.99,"This book offers an original interdisciplinary analysis of the relations between myth, identity and social reality, involving elements of narratology theory, linguistics, philosophy, anthropology and social theory, harnessed to support an argument firmly located in the area of literary criticism. This analysis yields a fairly extensive reinterpretation of the concept of myth, which is applied to the examination of the relationship between narrative and social reality as represented in texts by contemporary Scottish and Irish women writers. The main theoretical sources are Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of heteroglossia, Jacques Derrida’s theories of citationality and Judith Butler’s theories of subjectivity. The analysis framework developed in the book uses these theories to create a new way of understanding how literary texts change readers’ worldviews by enticing them to accept alternative possibilities of cultural expression of identity and social order. The texts analysed in this book reconfigure naturalised stories that have become normative and constraining in conveying identities and visions of legitimate social orders. The book’s focus on feminine identities places it alongside feminist analyses of reconstructions of fairy tales, myths or canonical stories that establish what counts as legitimate feminine identity. Studied here for the first time together, the writers whose texts form the interest of this book continue the revisionist work begun by other women writers who engage with the male generated literary, philosophical and humanist tradition. They share a view of narratives as tools for continually negotiating our identities, social worlds and socialisation scenarios. While the high-level theoretical discourse of the first part of the book requires specialised knowledge, the second part of the book, offering close readings of the texts, is both lively and accessible and should engage the interest of the general reader and academic alike. This book is written for all those who are interested in the power words have to hold sway over our inner and outer (social) worlds. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-08-01,Susan Shifrin,"“The Wandering Life I Led”: Essays on Hortense Mancini, Duchess Mazarin and Early Modern Women’s Border Crossings",Hardback,978-1-4438-1103-3,39.99,"This book of essays brings together international scholars working on the literary, visual, musical, and theatrical representations and reception of Hortense Mancini, Duchess Mazarin, an early modern woman whose literal—geographical—“border crossings” serve here as the starting point for an investigation of her and others’ elisions and transgressions of borders of all kinds. The authors lay out strategies for exploring the ways in which she crossed geographical, gendered, cultural, and—in scholarly terms—disciplinary boundaries, and in so doing, consider how an investigation of those border crossings can enhance our understanding of early modern cultural formation. The new work presented here by some of the most distinguished junior and senior scholars working today in the fields of history, art history, literary history, the history of theater, and the history of music promises to stimulate a broader scholarly discussion about early modern border-crossing and women’s places in the early modern period in general. ","""This volume is the fullest and most accurate account we may ever have of the fascinating career of the Duchess of Mazarin. More than that: it is a genuine contribution to our understanding of many aspects of European culture in the later seventeenth century, using the attractive and transgressive figure of the Duchess to explore larger social, political, and aesthetic issues. The disciplinary range is exemplary, as experts from art history, literature, music, and history bring their particular skills to bear upon a figure notable for her beauty, talent, and courage. Their contributions, rich in primary detail and interpretive nuance, shed new light on the period and its afterlife."" - James A. Winn, English Department, Boston University ""This volume of essays brings into admirable fullness one of the single most fascinating women in early modern European history, the proto-feminist Duchess Mazarin, née Hortence Mancini. The interdisciplinary panel of specialists assembled here presents her as the very paradigm of a key seventeenth-century concern: how to construct a sense of self, and in particular, a liberated female self in a male-dominated world. The Duchess Mazarin challenged contemporary expectations and conventions in a most public fashion, crossing numerous “borders” in full public view throughout her life. The differing disciplinary perspectives of the six essays map as well as match her own multi-faceted process of self-realization in all its complexity, while also providing the perspective of Hortense’s contemporary audience as a revealing counterbalance. Her compelling ‘story’ becomes even more so through these exemplary essays."" - Kathleen Nicholson, Art History Department, University of Oregon, Eugene ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-10-01,Nilgün Anadolu-Okur,"Women, Islam and Globalization in the Twenty-First Century",Hardback,978-1-4438-1309-9,39.99,"In this interdisciplinary volume, Dr. Nilgün Anadolu-Okur aims to communicate a constructive analysis of Muslim identity, but primarily of Muslim womanhood in the twenty-first century. Her own essay discusses Turkish women’s historical emancipation and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s reforms. The other contributors focus on civil, political and international human rights, family laws, honor killings, ethical and gender issues, education, participation in civil life, modernism versus conservatism, life in gated communities, and professional goals and rights of Muslim women under Shari’a law throughout a wide range of countries where Islam is not only the established faith of the land but a principal way of life. Through seven interdisciplinary essays, one play and an interview, the lesser-known aspects of Muslim womanhood in Muslim countries—including Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Lebanon—are examined. In addition, the essays depict legal and social impediments faced by Muslims who live in France, Germany and the United States. As an original work this volume seeks to articulate Muslim women’s daily struggles, challenges, choices and needs as they practice their rights of womanhood and motherhood in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Through an accurate analysis, a positive subtext is ultimately provided to Muslim identity, specifically to Muslim womanhood. Like anything else, during the age of globalization Islam is going through a transition. As expressed in this study, amendments to civil and religious laws, modifications in established governmental systems and the prominence of individual rights—as opposed to societal norms—coalesce to bring about a contemporary re-assessment of women’s rights within Islam globally. Additionally, this volume intends to articulate the concern commonly shared by various scholars that the Western mind needs to be illuminated and educated concerning racially motivated Eurocentric delineations which tend to dismiss the varied qualities and characteristics of Muslim women who have persevered for centuries under the unbending rule of Muslim men in power. Hence, this pioneering study explores the boundaries of the new female Muslim identity both within and outside the Muslim world at the crossroads of globalism and the twenty-first century. ","“This is certainly a timely topic, and the essays are thoughtful, carefully researched, and well-written. The bibliography will also be useful for the students of the subject.” —Professor Michael McGaha, Lucille D. Griffith Professor of Modern Languages, Pomona College, Claremont, California “Nilgün Anadolu-Okur’s edited volume is to be congratulated, as it casts light on the contemporary status of women in Islam. In particular, it comes timely in the present circumstance in which few studies approach Islam from both a critical and multi-disciplinary perspective. The editor is highly successful in gathering the contributors from different academic fields for various socio-cultural contexts and presenting a mosaic picture and realistic understanding of contemporary women in Islam. While each contributor approaches the common theme from a respective specialty in theology, philosophy, history, international law, sociology, anthropology, architecture and arts, all of the authors are inclusive in their depiction of Islam as a religio-political ideology, whereas globalization serves as the overarching contemporary frame affecting women in private and public spheres.” —Dr. Heon C. Kim, Assistant Professor, Intellectual Heritage, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-11-01,K.M. Ziyauddin and Eswarappa Kasi,Dimensions of Social Exclusion: Ethnographic Explorations,Hardback,978-1-4438-1342-6,39.99,"Dimensions of Social Exclusion focuses largely on social exclusion in the context of communities and social groups who have or have not been considered in discussing the benefits of mainstream inclusive society or development. Contemporary understanding of social exclusion has revived great interest among academics, researchers and policy makers in understanding problems from the perspectives of social exclusion. The decision to adopt the perspective of social exclusion has not been universal; rather the nature of this is very heterogeneous. In addition, the concept of social exclusion is not static; in reality, it is a process. The process is seen in the marginalization and discrimination of people in their everyday lives and interactions. The term ‘exclusion’ has become a part of the vocabulary in Europe and other developing societies like ‘poverty’ or ‘unemployment’; it is one of those words which seem to have both an everyday meaning and an underlying sense. It emphasizes the social aspects of concerns such as housing, health, employment, education, participation in social activities and festivities, social interaction and social intercourse. It excludes certain communities and groups from interaction and access to social resources through social arrangements, normative value systems and customs. Exclusion based on caste is one example and patriarchy is another, which is a form of systemic or constitutive exclusion. Having social, cultural, political and economic ramifications, it is also a complex and multi-dimensional concept. These dimensions are interwoven and are addressed in the different papers of the volume. This book revolves around the societal interventions and institutions that exclude, discriminate, isolate and deprive some groups on the basis of group identities such as caste or ethnicity. It covers a wide spectrum of societies and communities living in various cultural environments. The multidisciplinary nature of the book will render it helpful to students and researchers of sociology, anthropology, historical and political studies, demography, social work and gender studies in particular and the humanities in general. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-11-01,Ibrahim Olatunde Uthman,Feminist Insiders-Outsiders: Muslim Women in Nigeria and the Contemporary Feminist Movement,Hardback,978-1-4438-1350-1,39.99,"This book examines different brand of women’s feminist struggles and focuses on the struggles of Muslim women who are insiders in the Islamic Movement, as represented in Nigerian Muslim women’s Islamic activism. Drawing on different secular-Islamic Gender feminist theoretical frameworks, the book closely analyses Islamic texts and these Muslim women brand of feminism, which reflect the effects of their strong Islamic commitment culture on their gender relations, postulations and feminist struggles in general. It argues that the Islamic texts portray the pre-modern basis of these Muslim women Islamic feminism—born in the Prophetic era before the secular feminist movement, contrary to the common notion of the Islamic endorsement of Muslim women stereotypical backwardness, domestication and patriarchal domination. This book demonstrates how Muslim women writers have used Islamic organizations to work for, and contribute to, feminist changes. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009-11-01,Jane Hession,Women in the Modern Workplace: Gender Barriers to Business Start-Ups,Hardback,978-1-4438-1385-3,34.99,"The primary focus of this research is to examine the process of venture creation among women in Ireland and the dynamics at play, which affect the nascent female entrepreneur as she embarks on this process. A fundamentally explorative study, this research addresses idea formulation, motivations for business start-up, the start -up process and the challenges or barriers explicit to the nascent female entrepreneur. This study examines three nascent female entrepreneurs who are in the process of business start- up in order to assess the barriers or challenges they have experienced or anticipate to encounter as they embark on this venture. The aim of this study is to propose a theory concerning the challenges and barriers that have the most significant effect on women wishing to enter the new venture forum. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-01-01,Barbara Harbach and Diane Touliatos-Miles,"Women in the Arts: Eccentric Essays in Music, Visual Arts and Literature",Hardback,978-1-4438-1672-4,39.99,"Women in the Arts: Eccentric Essays in Music, Visual Arts, and Literature is a multi-disciplined celebration of past and present women creators. It marks a new departure in women’s studies, for it presents an interdisciplinary emphasis on the long-neglected area of women’s contributions to the various genres of the arts. Because of its unique historical approach, this pioneering collection of essays is useful in the areas of humanities and women’s studies as scholarly or pleasure readings. Many “firsts” are included in this anthology. There are chapters by three prominent award-winning living composers that discuss the plight of women in this male-dominated field and the pioneering contemporary innovations to the discipline of musical composition that women have contributed. Another chapter brings to light pioneering research on the names and musical compositions of the earliest women composers. Another gives historical evidence of the earliest documented women’s conservatory and its performers in the United States located in the Moravian Young Ladies’ Seminary in Antebellum Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The chapter on the MacDowell Colony reveals the history of how Marian MacDowell and her network of women’s music clubs helped to build the MacDowell Colony, a haven for artists that has continued through the twenty-first century. In the visual arts, one essay brings forth visual representations of women’s subjugation; another analyzes the photographic innovations and historical work of the woman pioneer, Nellie Ladd; the artistic contributions of two women of color, Josephine Baker and Frida Kahlo, are contrasted in a historical perspective; and a fascinating historical analyses of women and tattoos is presented. In the area of literature, the “Potters” are celebrated for pioneering the first serial hand-made magazine in 1904; another writer, discusses how she represents the role of motherhood in her female characters; and arguments are presented of how women poets give voice to spiritual feminism. The thirteen diverse essays present original contributions to the disciplines of music, visual arts, and literature. By bringing forth this collection, it is hoped that there will be greater appreciation for the great diversity and range of women creators and the obstacles that they had to overcome. It is hoped that the essays will provide a historical documentation of the artistic voice of women that have until now been neglected. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-05-01,Dianne Ottley,Grace Crowley’s Contribution to Australian Modernism and Geometric Abstraction,Hardback,978-1-4438-1977-0,39.99,"Grace Crowley has been recognized as a product of European modernism and was one of the leading innovators of geometric abstraction in Australia. Having studied in Paris in the 1920s with one of the leading art teachers, writers and theorists, André Lhote, she returned to Australia having mastered the complex mathematics and geometry of the golden section and dynamic symmetry, that had become a framework for modernism. Through her teaching of these compositional techniques at the most progressive modern art school in Sydney in the 1930s, she became a crucial influence on the group of artists now recognized as the historical forerunners to American colour-field painting introduced to Australia in the 1960s, and Australian abstraction. Through her close friendship with Anne Dangar, who played a critical role in the success of Albert Gleizes’ utopian art colony in rural France, Crowley maintained contact with mainstream European modernism and links to the Abstraction-Creation Group in Paris. During the 1940s and 1950s, Crowley worked with fellow-artist Ralph Balson, and together they developed their own style of geometric abstract art which reflected the spiritual dimensions of Kandinsky and Mondrian. Although undervalued in her own time, the sincerity and uncompromising quality of her work that transcends national boundaries, makes her one of the most important Australian women artists of her generation. ","“Dianne Ottley has presented a vivid and sensitive picture of Grace Crowley and her work, and has usefully assessed the history of writing and criticism surrounding the artist and her circle. She contributes significantly to the developments of Australian art history, and to the contribution of women who have often been short-changed by historians. Ottley demonstrates thorough knowledge of the literature in her field and brings confident analysis of the literature to her discussion. She has not only researched primary documents in the Crowley archive, but also contributed to the future of Crowley research by organizing the material for others. One of the strengths of the work is the innovative visual analysis Ottley brings to Crowley’s work, especially to Painting 1950 (NGV), and with her discussion and visualization of hidden geometries. Her theory of the significance of the triangle in the 1950 work, to Crowley’s personal perception of her isolation as an artist, is engaging and original.” —Dr. Ann Elias, Associate Professor, Theoretical Enquiry, Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-06-01,Nuala Finnegan and Jane E. Lavery,The Boom Femenino in Mexico: Reading Contemporary Women’s Writing,Hardback,978-1-4438-2125-4,44.99,"The Boom Femenino in Mexico: Reading Contemporary Women’s Writing is a collection of essays that focuses on literary production by women in Mexico over the last three decades. In its exploration of the boom femenino phenomenon, the book traces the history of the earlier boom in Latin American culture and investigates the implications of the use of the same term in the context of contemporary women’s writing from Mexico. In this way it engages critically with the cultural, historical and literary significance of the term illuminating the concept for a wide range of readers. It is clear that the entry of so many women writers into an arena traditionally reserved for men has prompted discussion around concepts such as ‘women’s writing’ and the very definition of ‘literature’ itself. Many of the contributors grapple with the theoretical tensions that such debates provoke offering an important opportunity to think critically about the texts produced during this period and the ways in which they have impacted on the Mexican and international cultural spheres. The project is comprehensive in its scope and, for the first time, brings together scholars from Mexico, the U.S. and Europe in a transnational forum. The book posits that despite certain aesthetic and thematic commonalities, the increased output by women writers in Mexico cannot be appraised as a unified literary movement. Instead it embraces a wide range of different generic forms and the subjects under study in the essays in the book include the best-selling work of Ángeles Mastretta, Elena Poniatowska and Laura Esquivel as well as the social and political preoccupations of journalists, Rosanna Reguillo and Cristina Pacheco. Contributors offer readings of the aesthetic visions of writers as diverse as Carmen Boullosa, Ana García Bergua, and Eve Gil while other essays examine the nuances of contemporary gender identity in the work of Ana Clavel, Sabina Berman, Brianda Domecq and María Luisa Puga. There are essays devoted to poetry by indigenous Mayan women and an analysis of the complex place of poetry within the broader framework of literary production. The problems that emerge as a result of literary cataloguing based on gender politics are also considered at length in a number of essays that take a panoramic view of literary production over the period. Various critical approaches are employed throughout and the collection as a whole demonstrates that academic interest in Mexican women’s writing of the boom femenio is thriving. Above all, the essays here provide a space in which the location of women within prevailing cultural paradigms in Mexico and their role in the mapping of power in evolving textual canons may be interrogated. It is clear from the collection that interest in such issues is still alive and that the debate is far from over. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-06-01,Natalie Edwards and Christopher Hogarth,"This ""Self"" Which Is Not One: Women’s Life Writing in French",Hardback,978-1-4438-2079-0,34.99,"The “Self” Which is Not One: Women’s Life-Writing in French, assembles articles on women’s life-writing from diverse areas of the Francophone world. It is comprised of nine chapters that discuss female writers from North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean and Europe, in addition to French writers. The idea of the self is currently attracting widespread interest in academia, most notably in the arts and humanities. The development of postmodernism supposes a fragmented “subject” formed from the network of available discourses, rather than a stable and coherent self. Jacques Derrida, for example, wrote that there is no longer any such things as a “full subject,” and Julia Kristeva now insists that the individual is a “subject in process.” The growing importance of psychoanalytic theory, particular in French studies, has also impacted upon this development. The basic tenet of psychoanalytic theory is that the individual is formed of a duality: the conscious and unconscious parts of the self which prevent the individual from ever fully knowing her/himself, and which thus insists upon a plural, incomplete self. Developments in the field of postcolonial studies have also made us aware of different ways of approaching the self in different parts of the world, and eroded the idea of a stable, conscious and complete self. As scholars examine these new ways of approaching the self, autobiography has been the subject of renewed interest. Several academic books have appeared in recent years that study the ways in which autobiographers represent the self as incomplete, evolving and elusive. In particular, a number of books have appeared on the subject of women’s autobiography and female subjectivity, such as works by Sidonie Smith, Julia Watson and Nancy Miller, and several volumes interrogate postcolonial women’s autobiography, such as texts by Françoise Lionnet, Gayatri Spivak, Carole Boyce Davies and Chandra Mohanty. Our volume unites these strands of criticism, by examining ways that female autobiographies write the self as a fragmented, plural construct across the Francophone world. This will be the first book-length study of this important development. This volume will be of interest primarily to students and scholars working in the areas of life-writing, French and Francophone studies, postcolonial studies and gender studies. The volume contributes to multiple areas that are currently garnering substantial interest in academe: postcolonial studies, Francophone studies, gender studies and women’s writing. By comparing works from across the Francophone world, our volume takes a global approach to the genre of autobiography and its inflections by women writers. The “Self” That is Not One in Women’s Autobiography in French therefore represents a timely intervention in several interlinking academic fields and will thus garner substantial interest. ","""This volume is a clearly focused contribution to the growing body of scholarly work on contemporary women's life writing...the volume provides a coherent and stimulating study of nine remarkable women writers who probe the limits of life writing, and whose innovative strategies explore the problem of negotiating and holding together a plural sense of self."" Shirley Jordan, Queen Mary University of London in Modern and Contemporary France Journal, 2011 ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-06-01,Iffat Hussain,Women and Depression,Hardback,978-1-4438-2114-8,34.99,"Women and Depression is a multidisciplinary book. It is a collection of research papers and essays from authors in the fields of sociology, public health, psychology and psychiatry. It presents further interdisciplinary views on women and depression. The authors have communicated their professional experience, information and knowledge, integrating the latest information about women and depression. The chapters explore different aspects of women and depression, for example, how the community, social, and religious aspects play their roles in developing or fighting depression among women. In some chapters authors have shared their personal experiences, and their friends’ experiences, which caused depression. Other chapters include medical points that lead to depression in women whereas some chapters explore the healing power of self-help such as yoga and meditation. This book offers a comprehensive understanding of depression which is so common among women. It provides an insight from a wide variety of professionals and people outside the medical field. The essays are not purely medically based: the book is also intended to be accessible for those outside the medical field including patients with depression, their families and friends, and all those who are interested in this condition. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-07-01,Maria Tamboukou,In the Fold between Power and Desire: Women Artists’ Narratives,Hardback,978-1-4438-2148-3,39.99,"This book explores entanglements of power relations and forces of desire in life narratives and visual images. The analysis draws on paintings and archival auto/biographical writings of six fin-de-siècle women artists, who are brought together as narrative personae in a genealogical exploration of the constitution of the female self in art. The author offers an innovative theoretical approach to narrative research by bringing together feminist theories with Foucauldian and DeleuzoGuattarian analytics. The book will be of particular interest for researchers and graduate students in the fields of feminist, narrative and visual studies. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-09-01,Wissia Fiorucci,Anna Banti and the (Im)possibility of Love,Hardback,978-1-4438-2336-4,34.99,"This book looks into Banti’s stance on Italian feminism, with a specific focus on her interpretation of the concept of “equality” as well as of “sexual difference”. An analysis of a novel, A Piercing Cry (1981), and two short stories, The Women Are Dying (1951) and Je vous écris d’un pays lointain (1971), explores the aforementioned issues. The book also deals to some extent with the most famous of Banti’s works, the magnum opus Artemisia (1947). Because A Piercing Cry is a source of autobiographical elements, which therefore are particularly significant, the conclusions drawn from this novel are later applied to The Women Are Dying and Je vous écris d’un pays lointain. Certainly, A Piercing Cry expresses Banti’s faith in difference as being that which can preserve woman’s identity. By declaring “I am a woman writer”, she distances herself from a feminism of equality that, not without oscillations, she had supported throughout Artemisia. In so doing, she embraces a feminism of difference by adopting this concept herself. Drawing on these considerations, the book argues that in both The Women Are Dying, and in Je vous écris d’un pays lointain, Banti intended to support a personally elaborated and ante-litteram “feminism of difference”. ","“In this focused presentation of three of Anna Banti’s works (A Piercing Cry of 1981, Le donne muoiono (The Women are Dying of 1951) and Je vous écris d’un pays lointain (I Write to you from a Faraway Land of 1971)), Wissia Fiorucci sets out to examine Anna Banti’s representations of her male and female characters and their capacity for relationships, through the lens of Banti’s sometimes equivocal, and changing, relationship with feminisms and with the feminist movement (particularly in the Italian context). A Piercing Cry is analysed here in its autobiographical dimensions; and, in Fiorucci’s view, the protagonist’s recognition of herself as ‘a woman writer’ encapsulates Banti’s recognition of the significance of sexual difference. Here Fiorucci draws ably on Adriana Cavarero’s theoretical writings on sexual difference to illustrate similarities between her thought and that of Banti. The analysis of The Women are Dying deals with ‘otherness’ as a characteristic of both women and explores Banti’s representation of otherness here through the lens of the 1970 manifesto of Rivolta femminile to interesting effect. Love for, and connectedness to, the Other proves crucial in this reading. Finally, Fiorucci’s incisive reading of Je vous écris shows how Banti problematises notions of equality, and its potentially terrifying annihilation of all differences. Again, connectedness and love for the Other are privileged here. Part and parcel of the exploration of difference, too, resides in Banti’s very modern concern for identity and how that might be defined. Through an insightful and theoretically astute analysis of these works by Banti, Fiorucci invites us to consider her anew, and differently.” —Ursula Fanning, PhD, Senior Lecturer in Italian Studies, School of Languages and Literatures, University College Dublin, Republic of Ireland ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-09-01,Paul Salzman,Expanding the Canon of Early Modern Women’s Writing,Hardback,978-1-4438-2322-7,39.99,"This exciting collection of original essays on early modern women’s writing offers a range of approaches to a growing field. As a whole, the volume introduces readers to a number of writers, such as Mirabai and Liu Rushi, who are virtually invisible in Anglophone scholarship, and to writers who remain little known, such as Elizabeth Melville, Elizabeth Hatton, and Jane Sharpe. The volume also represents critical strategies designed to open up the emergent canon of early modern women’s writing to new approaches, especially those that have consolidated the integration of literary and intellectual history, with an emphasis on religion, legal issues, and questions of genre. The authors expand the methodological possibilities available to approach early modern women who wrote in a diverse number of genres, from letters to poetry, autobiography and prose fiction. The sixteen essays are a major contribution to an area that has attracted the interest of a number of fields, including literary studies, history, cultural studies, and women’s studies. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-09-01,Malin Hedlin Hayden and Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe,Feminisms is Still Our Name: Seven Essays on Historiography and Curatorial Practices,Hardback,978-1-4438-2331-9,39.99,"Feminisms have played a crucial part in art, art history and curatorial practices over the last forty years. Hence, it is by now imperative to scrutinize the history of feminist theories and methods within both fields. Feminisms is Still Our Name is an anthology that critically debates the current status of feminisms in visual art and its relation to past art histories and possible feminist futures. It brings together essays by leading scholars in order to meet the urgent need both for a critical historiography and for re-vitalizations of feminist practices within written as well as visual narratives of modern and contemporary art. From a variety of perspectives, the editors and contributors to this book initiate a much-needed debate about possible strategies for a renewal of feminisms in art history and curating. At the same time, it demonstrates the necessity of further explorations and research into the diversity of feminist pasts. Indeed, this volume provides strong arguments that historiographical critique is an inevitable part of any future feminism(s). In providing fresh approaches to such important fields as feminist art history and feminist curating, the essays assembled in Feminisms is Still Our Name will provoke fruitful discussion about the relation between academic and curatorial feminist practices. Contributors: Renee Baert, Malin Hedlin Hayden, Lolita Jablonskiene, Amelia Jones, Mary Kelly, Griselda Pollock, and Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-10-01,Claudette Fillard and Françoise Orazi,Exchanges and Correspondence: The Construction of Feminism,Hardback,978-1-4438-2396-8,44.99,"Through the eighteen essays of this book, the reader becomes the beholder of a challenging survey of “feminism-in-the-making,” from its early stages in the 18th century to the present, in Anglo-Saxon countries and elsewhere, including Eastern Europe and some places under the influence of communism or Islam. The development of exchanges and correspondence enabled feminism to pre-exist the word itself, which leads several contributors to ponder over its meaning as well as over the notion of influence, a pivotal component of their reflection. Through the complex interplay of harmony and disharmony, openly acknowledged or carefully hidden similarities or differences, and the delineation of the converging or conflicting forces which the authors of this volume attempt to disentangle, a fascinating chorus of voices eventually emerges from this volume, a preview of the budding “sisterhood.” It throws light on the major factors in women’s growing consciousness of their plight and of the main stakes in the struggle for the defense of their rights. Scholars of different national origins and methodological approaches here join forces until the book itself amounts to an innovative web of exchanges and correspondences, its medium as well as its avowed message. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-10-01,Janet Holmes and Meredith Marra,"Femininity, Feminism and Gendered Discourse: A Selected and Edited Collection of Papers from the Fifth International Language and Gender Association Conference (IGALA5)",Hardback,978-1-4438-2364-7,39.99,"The chapters in this book illustrate a range of cutting edge research in language and gender studies, with contributions from a number of internationally recognised experts. The three themes, femininity, feminism and gendered discourse are central to research in language and gender, and the book thus makes a valuable contribution to a number of current debates. Femininity comprises a central aspect of gender performance and the process of “gendering” individuals is on-going and unavoidable. For many people, the word “femininity” has associations with “frilly pink party dresses,” with demureness, deference, and lack of power and influence. The first section of this book demonstrates some alternative conceptions of femininity, and a range of ways in which femininity is performed in different contexts and cultures. The analyses illustrate that we are all continually performing aspects of femininity (and masculinity) in flexible, dynamic, ambiguous, predictable and unpredictable ways. Language and gender research has a long tradition of engagement with the political, and specifically with feminism and feminist goals. The chapters in the second section of this book demonstrate the value of identifying gendered patterns in order to challenge their potentially repressive effects in social interaction in a range of spheres. The researchers analyse contemporary international evidence of sexism in language use, including material from Japanese spam emails expressing sexual desire, and from media reporting on male and female candidates in the 2007 French elections. The final section of this book focuses on the different ways in which we negotiate our gender through discourse. Gender is just one of many facets of our intrinsically hybridized social identities. Nevertheless, it is a very significant facet, a salient dimension in everyday life, with a pervasive social influence on everything we do and say. Interaction is typically viewed through “gendered” spectacles much of the time. The chapters in the third section focus in detail on diverse ways in which gender is constructed through discourse, examining the interaction between individual agency and the larger constraining social structures, including socio-cultural norms, within which that agency is enacted. Finally, the different contributions in this book represent research from a multiplicity of geographic and cultural backgrounds, supporting efforts to internationalise language and gender research, and to raise awareness of empirical studies undertaken in a wide range of linguistic and cultural contexts. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-10-01,Elizabeth Graham,Meanings of Ripley: The Alien Quadrilogy and Gender,Hardback,978-1-4438-2339-5,39.99,"Ellen Ripley of the Alien Quadrilogy has become an iconic female figure in the male dominated genre of science fiction/action/horror since her first appearance in 1979. This collection offers readers varied interpretations of Ripley that are grounded in the social context and theoretical perspectives that were dominant prior to and during the time the films were released. Specifically, the rise of Second Wave Feminism—and the backlash against it—provides a backdrop for this collection. Is Ripley a feminist hero? A patriarchal woman and mother? Does she embody de Beavoir’s “myth of the feminine”? Does she exhibit sexual agency? Does she offer us a glimpse of individual autonomy that moves away from dichotomous gender roles? These are the primary questions explored in this collection. While the focus is clearly on Ripley, the arguments go beyond the confines of the films by examining the relationship between the individual and society in which both are product and producer of the other, and illustrate that social artifacts such as film can provide insights into the lived experiences of our world. The contributors come from a variety of backgrounds including Literature, Cinema Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, Philosophy, Sociology, Theatre History, and reside in Canada and the United States. They represent a range from junior to senior scholars. While science fiction is clearly an interest of all these individuals, it is not the primary area of research for most of them. By bringing voices from multiple disciplines into the discussion about Ripley, this collection offers readers perspectives that deviate from and yet complement the current trend in film criticism and, thus, contributes to opening up discussions about such characters and the genre to a wider audience. ","“The success of the Alien series in the 1980s and 90s started a renaissance in the production of artistically ambitious science fiction movies by major Hollywood studios. In this anthology, authors from a variety of disciplines look past the fight scenes and expensive visual effects to the true source of the films’ enduring popularity: the enigmatic figure of Ellen Ripley. Their contributions provide valuable insights into Ripley’s status as an autonomous agent, her significance as a feminist icon, and her ambiguous relationship with the monstrous aliens themselves. For movie buffs, students of contemporary popular culture, and scholars who love science fiction, this book should serve as an indispensable companion to the films.” —Mark Silcox, PhD Assistant Professor of Humanities and Philosophy, University of Central Oklahoma ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-10-01,Elizabeth Hicks,The Still Life in the Fiction of A. S. Byatt,Hardback,978-1-4438-2385-2,39.99,"This book explores the ways in which English writer A. S. Byatt’s visual still lifes (descriptions of real or imagined artworks) and what are termed “verbal still lifes” (scenes such as laid tables, rooms and market stalls) are informed by her veneration of both realism and writing. It examines Byatt’s adoption of the Barthesian concept of textual pleasure, showing how her ekphrastic descriptions involve consumption and take time to unfold for the reader, thereby highlighting the limitations of painting. It also investigates the ways in which Byatt’s still lifes demonstrate her debts to English modernist author Virginia Woolf, French writer Marcel Proust, and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of nineteenth-century Britain. A number of Byatt’s verbal still lifes are read as semiotic markers of her characters, particularly with regard to economic status and class. Further, her descriptions uniting food and sexuality are perceived as part of her overall representation of pleasure. Finally, Byatt’s employment of vanitas iconography in many of her portrayals of death is discussed showing how her recurring motif of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” teases out the still life’s inherent tension between living passion and “cold” artwork. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-10-01,Justyna Wlodarczyk,Ungrateful Daughters: Third Wave Feminist Writings,Hardback,978-1-4438-2369-2,34.99,"Has the third wave of feminism in the United States spawned a literary movement? Is there a third wave equivalent of the consciousness-rasing novel? A lot has been written about the relationship of the third wave of feminism in the United States to the second wave, yet no one has examined works by young female writers as belonging to the third wave of feminism. This book fills the gap. Using tools of literary criticism to analyze the literary output of third wave feminism in the United States, Ungrateful Daughters looks at the main anthologies of third wave writings, paying attention to their structure, production process and narrative forms used in the individual pieces. It also attempts to define third wave fiction and analyze the memoirs and novels coming from writers who could be classified as third wave (specifically, Rebecca Walker, Danzy Senna and Michelle Tea), tracing how these books exhibit “third wave sensibility” and reflect generational experiences of third wave writers. A lot of attention is devoted to comparisons of second and third wave feminism and the ambivalent relationship of third wave feminism to postfeminism. Wendy Kaminer wrote in True Love Waits: “If it ultimately fails as a liberation movement, feminism will at least have achieved considerable literary success.” Ungrateful Daughters examines whether the literary success helps or hinders the cause of women’s liberation. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-11-01,"Marja Rytkönen, Kirsi Kurkijärvi, Urszula Chowaniec and Ursula Phillips",Mapping Experience in Polish and Russian Women’s Writing,Hardback,978-1-4438-2493-4,39.99,"The volume encompasses eleven articles which discuss the critical views that Polish and Russian women writers have articulated with regard to the notion of experience and constructions of femininity in the national imagination from the 19th to the 21st centuries. Major themes of the articles include women’s experiences as writers in the 19th century; women’s embodied experiences of a traumatic past; body and sexuality in the different ages of women; political and aesthetic discourses and femininity. Although the articles are arranged in chronological order, they do not form an absolute chronological or periodic continuum, i.e. from Romanticism to Postmodernism, although references to certain aesthetic periods are made. The authors of the articles reflect in detail on how the women writers and their literary texts represent different understandings and experiences in relation to dominant perceptions, for example, of the memory of war, of motherhood, of art and aesthetics, and so on. Readers are encouraged to seek parallels and continuities between the different historical times and spaces; between women’s writing in Russia and Poland; between different scholarly approaches and aims. The articles of this volume bring together important critical standpoints in women’s writing in Poland and Russia, in which parallels, continuities, and resemblances can be traced, but in which discontinuities, breaks and differences also make themselves visible. Apart from the conspicuous resemblances between individual Russian and Polish women writers’ works, or even between groups of women writers, the articles document the diversity within Russian and Polish women’s writing, respectively, and even within individual writers. ","“Mapping Experience in Polish and Russian Women’s Writing is undoubtedly a breakthrough in feminist reflection. The book concentrates on problems considered from an innovative angle. … The book searches for the cultural, historical, political and poetic differences and similarities between the two Slavic countries and at the same time it does not confine itself to mere enumeration, rather it tends to expand its feminist comparative aspects with western feminist scholarship.” —Professor Krystyna Klosinska, University of Silesia “For readers generally familiar with East European cultures, this book offers fascinating new insights into the complex narrative of Polish and Russian women’s writing. For someone less knowledgeable with the culture of this part of the world, these essays provide a compelling introduction to important aspects of Polish and Russian literature through a gendered perspective.” —Elena Sokol, Professor Emerita, Russian Studies, The College of Wooster, Ohio, U.S.A. ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-11-01,Shekh Moinuddin,Media Space and Gender Construction: A Comparative Study of State Owned and Private Channels in the Post Liberalisation Period,Hardback,978-1-4438-2503-0,34.99,"Media Space has become a rich intellectual resource in understanding spatial complexities. This innovative book extends the understanding of spatial perspective to non-material spaces. The relationship between geography and gender is explored from an Indian perspective with the help of Media Space. Media Space is a virtual and metamorphic space where people can express and communicate views, ideas, images, and texts. Media Space is indeed a place where the construction of gender stereotypes, using various media, influences viewers. This study offers a diagnostic look at visual media and their consideration of soap operas, in term of both State and market responsibility, since liberalization took place in India. The study broadens the research scope of the geographical perspective in both non-material and material space, including television and other modes of virtual space. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2010-12-01,Fiona Reid and Katherine Holden,"Women on the Move: Refugees, Migration and Exile",Hardback,978-1-4438-2568-9,34.99,"This is an innovative and wide-ranging edited collection which brings women clearly into view, reflecting their disproportionately high numbers within migrating populations. Spanning four centuries, its contents are culturally diverse but address some important common themes and questions. Beginning with a useful survey of women in migration studies in early modern Europe, subsequent chapters explore the following topics: the exile experiences in Europe, firstly of English Brigittine nuns, and secondly of Catholic Gentlewomen displaced by the English Reformation; the dual national identities of a French woman moving to America during the revolutionary period; the lives of two women preachers moving to an American city with a large migrant population in the mid 20th century; and finally, autobiographical narratives of Islamic women exiled in body and/or mind from their countries of origin in the late twentieth century. The authors and editors consider the significance of spirituality amongst women migrants, address the difficulties of generalising from individual experiences and consider issues raised by a particular focus on elite women. The focus on personal narratives crosses disciplinary boundaries making it a valuable resource for students and researchers interested in migration history, autobiography, personal narratives, social history and gender and women’s studies. ","“This is an engaging and informative book which relates the migratory and exilic experiences if diverse groups of women over the past 400 years. What is perhaps most striking throughout the book is the extent to which women are particularly well represented throughout all of the migratory processes described across this extensive time period. This is the only contribution addressing the experiences of, and modes of self-representation developed by, non-Christian elite migrant/refugee women. “ Maryanne Loughry, Jesuit service Australia ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-01-01,Silvia Pilar Castro Borrego and Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz,Cultural Migrations and Gendered Subjects: Colonial and Postcolonial Representations of the Female Body,Hardback,978-1-4438-2646-4,34.99,"The present volume explores through cultural and literary representations the contributions of women to the construction of knowledge in an ever changing, global world as migrant subjects. The essays contained in this book also focus on the female body as a site of physical violence and abuse, fighting prevalent stereotypes about women’s representations and identities. This collection intends to enter a forum of discussion in which the colonial past serves as a point of reference for the analysis of contemporary issues. Women’s strategies for building possible identities are seen to be based on their own experiences, seeking the ways in which the public marking and marketing of the female body within the western male imaginary contributes to the making of women’s social and personal identities. The different articles contained in this volume examine issues of gender and boundaries, the realities of women as colonial and postcolonial subjects, and darker realities such as alienation and discrimination as a result of migration, racism, and colonization analysed through a variety of critical perspectives. The gendered, raced, classed dimensions and mixed heritages not only of white women but also of women of the African Diaspora; these are important issues for the construction of knowledge and identity in our present multicultural societies, and can potentially change the ways we conceptualize, situate and engage the humanities in our scholarly work and in our social and cultural policies. These women, their presumed sexuality and their capacity to produce hybrid subjects, as well as their supposed irrationality make them a singularly disruptive figure in our contemporary world; this interpretation has its roots in the treatment of women in colonial times, especially when they were out of the margins of respectable society. The volume is addressed to a wide readership, both scholarly and those interested in investigating the dynamics of the social and cultural conceptualizations of our multicultural and multiethnic contemporary societies, marked by the intercultural exchanges of migratory subjects from a gender perspective. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-01-01,Eleanor Milligan,The Ethics of Consent and Choice in Prenatal Screening,Hardback,978-1-4438-2648-8,39.99,"Increasingly, notions of individual autonomy, personal “choice” and preference have become woven into our reproductive expectations. With respect to prenatal screening, the choices sought, offered or denied are shaped and interpreted through a range of social, personal, institutional and philosophical lenses. While prenatal screening seeks to promote parental choice and early intervention, for the most part, the genetic anomalies commonly targeted are inherently “unfixable.” Frequently, the only further intervention on offer is selective termination. Hence, the practice of prenatal screening raises complex ethical questions, forcing judgement on the desirability or undesirability of certain traits in our future offspring. This book explores the numerous factors that shape how such ethical choices are interpreted from the perspective of individual mothers and health care providers, and considers the impact of these factors on personal autonomy and consent to prenatal screening. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-02-01,Ioana Raluca Larco and Fabiana Cecchini,"Italian Women and Autobiography: Ideology, Discourse and Identity in Female Life Narratives from Fascism to the Present",Hardback,978-1-4438-2655-6,34.99,"The essays included in this collection examine issues such as identity and ideology which are at play in the female autobiography practice, along with the problematicity that these trigger in terms of self-representation and traditional formal boundaries. The women writers analyzed here through mainly historical, literary, feminist and psychoanalytic lenses cover a long period in the history of Italy, spanning from the Fascist era to our time. In an attempt to organize and connect these texts which are chronologically far apart, we have divided our contributions into two main parts. The first, “Shapes of Ideology,” includes authors interacting primarily with political ideology in a way that eventually entails the challenge of the official “technologies of gender” (De Lauretis, 1987) and implicitly, a reflection on the gendered identity. In the second part, “Reconsidering ideology, negotiating autobiography,” while the political ideology is not completely excluded, it becomes however something more internalized and relevant to the writers’ quest for identity. Such process bears consequences with respect to the canon of autobiography, as authors experiment with new forms of autobiographical narratives and readers become more and more an integral component of this personal endeavor. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-03-01,Rédouane Abouddahab and Josiane Paccaud-Huguet,"Fiction, Crime, and the Feminine",Hardback,978-1-4438-2710-2,39.99,"The form of art called fiction has always been the privileged framework providing the perfect alibi for facing, framing, and containing the Other’s desire and the strange libido attached to violence: in other words, there is an ambivalent dimension inherent in the scenarios and fantasies we enjoy by proxy. Are not the fairy tales of our childhood full of images of death and violence, whose fascinating presence is paradoxically meant to make us feel all the more safely tucked up in bed? After all, the wolf or the Little Red Riding Hood, the monstrous killer or the unfortunate victim are but fictitious characters, mere shifting positions: they are “not me”—therefore, thanks to the willing suspension of disbelief process, any reading “I” may shift into their speech or thoughts on the fictional screen, a stage both for projection of and protection from such forbidden enjoyments. Crime fiction has also for a long time been the genre for such containment. Ever since Victorian “craniology,” criminal violence has remained as resistant as ever to scientific measurement—even to the more recent techniques of investigation of the brain. Where women are concerned they were first and mostly fascinating victims but they also nowadays feature in the role of the criminals, adding to the first fascination the mystery of a woman’s desire beyond the pale of societal expectations. Indeed, more and more pieces of crime fiction nowadays refuse to grant the simple pleasures of old: what if, for example, the text refuses to comply to the “whodunnit” convention? What about those stories that instead of closure, will diffuse a mist, a sense of unrest by their emphasis on the inexplicable lure of violence? In other words, gone are the days of the satisfaction granted by traditional closure and return to a solidly structured society, made safe again by the disposal of the scene of violence. But writing as such is also to be taken into consideration, and what forcefully determines the writing is not only the historical trauma (whose active presence in the fiction cannot be denied), but especially some unresolved traumatic event or exclusion that makes one write and, through the writing, quest bliss, but that also makes one renounce the attachment to the inevitably lost bliss. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-03-01,Christine Leiren Mower and Susanne Weil,Women and Work: The Labors of Self-Fashioning,Hardback,978-1-4438-2422-4,44.99,"While issues surrounding women and work may be more subtle today than in the past, problems of workplace equity, child-rearing, and domestic labor pose problems of balance that continue to evade solution as women today face substantial shifts in the meanings and practices of marriage, work, and reproduction amid a globalized economy. The essays in Women and Work: The Labors of Self-Fashioning explore how nineteenth- and twentieth-century US and British writers represent the work of being women—where “work” is defined broadly to encompass not only paid labor inside and outside the home, but also the work of performing femininity and domesticity. How did nineteenth- and twentieth-century US and British writers revise then-contemporary social assumptions about who should be performing work, and for what purpose? How fully did these writers perceive the class implications of their arguments for taking jobs outside the home? How does work, both inside and outside the home, contribute to female identity and, conversely, how does it promote what legal theorist Kenji Yoshino terms the demands of “covering”—women’s strategic use of stereotypes of femininity and masculinity to succeed in the marketplace? In articles appropriate for both upper-level undergraduate and graduate students in literature and literary history, women’s studies, feminist and gender studies, contributors engage these questions, covering both canonical and popular “middlebrow” nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers such as Gilman, Cather, Alcott, Schreiner, Wharton, Le Sueur, Gissing, Wood, Lewis and Mitchell. Women and Work will also interest scholars concerned with this developing discourse. ","“Women and Work offers a timely treatment of a timeless problem: the dilemmas working women experience as they seek to balance the often conflicting demands of women’s work. Mower and Weil have compiled an outstanding collection of writings about how women writers have historically conceptualized and addressed those demands in their fiction.” —Priscilla Wald, Duke University, author of Constituting Americans and Cultures and Carriers “Encompassing a rich diversity of critical approaches and primary texts, Mower’s and Weil’s collection is a significant contribution to contemporary debates about labor, class, race, and gender in nineteenth- and twentieth-century US and British writings. The authors show how the routinely-disavowed reality of women’s work, paid and unpaid, domestic and otherwise, has provided both literary occasion and preoccupation for writers representing a variety of class positions. The comparative, trans-Atlantic focus is especially innovative and welcome.” —Lori Merish, Georgetown University, author of Sentimental Materialism ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-05-01,Deveryle James,"""A Zoo of Lusts…A Harem of Fondled Hatreds"": An Historical Interrogation of Sexual Violence against Women in Film",Hardback,978-1-4438-2898-7,34.99,"“A Zoo of Lusts . . . A Harem of Fondled Hatred”: An Historical Interrogation of Sexual Violence against Women in Film explores the pernicious nature of rape in films from the silent era to the 21st century. Film is an excellent medium through which to hold this discussion, because film, like the body, as Judith Butler, et al. suggest, is fluid and indeterminate, and it is often contemplated as a site for negotiation and resistance. This book addresses three major questions: (1) why does rape persist as a recurring theme in film, (2) how is this subject manifested in film and (3) what does this manifestation say about the act of rape itself, its victims, its perpetrators and our culture? Rape is a sexual manifestation of aggression with the purpose of overpowering, humiliating, and hurting its victims. An examination of media accounts has revealed that before the evolution of feminist film theory and the dismissal of the Production Code, the rape victim in films usually fits into one “neat” set of criteria (e.g., young adult, white, single, middle class, heterosexual). When the victim’s physical makeup deviated from the traditional set of criteria (e.g., a child or a mature person of color, married, poor, homosexual), the rape was portrayed more violently. The research for this book dwells on the portrayal of the latter type of victims because their sexual violations evoke an absorbing commentary on society’s reaction toward those who do not easily fit within the status quo. What is it about the makeup of these victims that makes their violations more horrific? ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-06-01,Rosalind Marsh and Olga Tabachnikova,"New Women’s Writing in Russia, Central and Eastern Europe: Gender, Generation and Identities",Hardback,978-1-4438-2922-9,64.99,"Since the late 1980s, there has been an explosion of women’s writing in Russia, Central and Eastern Europe greater than in any other cultural period. This book, which contains contributions by scholars and writers from many different countries, aims to address the gap in literature and debate that exists in relation to this subject. We investigate why women’s writing has become so prominent in post-socialist countries, and enquire whether writers regard their gender as a burden, or, on the contrary, as empowering. Legacies and comparisons between different generations of women writers are examined in order to assess how far contemporary authors accept or contest traditional views and images of femininity and masculinity still prevalent in their cultures. We explore the relationship in contemporary women’s writing between gender, class, and nationality, as well as issues of ethnicity and post-colonialism, widely discussed in Western feminism. The emergence of openly erotic and lesbian writing is also discussed. This volume suggests that, even though they rarely use the label ‘feminist’, some contemporary women writers seek to challenge such long-standing cultural stereotypes as the beautiful, morally strong, but non-intellectual woman, the caring mother, the saintly prostitute, or the mother as symbol of the nation. ","“An impressive volume. This book is indispensible reading for all those seriously interested in the politics and culture of post-communist Central and Eastern Europe. Rosalind Marsh's lengthy Introduction to these wide-ranging and perceptive essays is marked by lucidity and balance in areas that often privilege polemics over scholarship.” —Professor Robert Porter, Emeritus Professor of Slavonic Studies, University of Glasgow (an expert in modern and contemporary Russian and Czech literature) « This hugely impressive book will be essential reading for anyone seriously interested in contemporary women’s literature in Russia and Eastern Europe. Bringing together a number of leading scholars from the UK, the US, Russia and elsewhere, it features both comprehensive surveys of women’s writing and incisive studies of individual authors. The introduction is especially welcome, as it contains an invaluable overview of scholarly work in the field. The book’s appeal is further enhanced by the fascinating contributions which it contains from writers themselves. Scholarly and yet accessible, New Women’s Writing in Russia, Central and Eastern Europe will be of particular interest to students of Slavic studies, gender studies and comparative literature. » — Dr Graham Roberts, the Sorbonne ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-06-01,Donna Spalding Andréolle and Véronique Molinari,"Women and Science, 17th Century to Present: Pioneers, Activists and Protagonists",Hardback,978-1-4438-2918-2,44.99,"If women’s interest and participation in the advancement of science has a long history, the academic study of their contributions is a far more recent phenomenon, to be placed in the wake of “second wave” feminism in the 1970s and the advent of women’s studies which have, since then, given impetus to research on female figures in specific fields or, more generally speaking, on women’s battles to gain access to knowledge, education and recognition in the scientific world. These studies—while providing a useful insight into the contributions of a few more or less well-known figures—have mostly focused, however, on the obstacles that women have had to overcome in the field of education and employment or in their quest for acknowledgement by their male peers. The aim of this volume is to try and approach the issue from a different and more comprehensive point of view, taking into account not only the position of women in science, but also the link between women and science through the analysis of various kinds of discourse and representation such as the press, poetry, fiction, biographies and autobiographies or professional journals—including that of women themselves. The questions of the presentation or re(-)presentation of science by women are thus at the core of this study, as well as that of the portrayal and self-portrayal of women in the sciences (whether in the educational, or the professional field). A final part examines how women are represented in science fiction which, like science itself, has traditionally been a field dominated by men. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-07-01,Rekha Pande,Gender Lens: Women’s Issues and Perspectives in Contemporary Societies,Hardback,978-1-4438-2973-1,64.99,"As the title suggests the present book Gender lens, Women’s issues and perspectives in Contemporary Societies, explores the cultural meanings of gender and gender differences in the rapidly changing societies that offer us a multitude of meanings in these new contexts. It makes us think critically not only about gender but about other social divisions as well some of which have entered the mainstream vocabulary only now. Change has suddenly been thrust on our society propelling it into the future bringing about large scale transformations that have made our society unrecognizable, highlighting a fundamental disconnect between representations and the ground reality of today. Scholars are still unpacking these changes to better understand the workings of society and have forced us to do a rethink on the viability of categories employed forcing us to locate them in a new context. The aim of this work is to expand our knowledge and understanding of women in our own society and also about women who are living in societies very different from us. This book is an interdisciplinary work that places gender at the intersection of society, caste, race, sexuality and work. These structural forces have shaped the individual and collective lives of women across diverse cultures and times as well as provide analytical categories for critically examining the worlds in which we live. The book highlights on themes related to the women’s movement, governance, caste, class and race, work and labor, violence and sexual harassment, health, fundamentalism and women in margins besides information and communication technology. It is a challenge to incorporate all the varieties that characterize the diverse issues related to women in today’s world. While a fundamental shift is seen in all the fields these categories employed for understanding society are also not static further problematizing our frames of reference. On this dissimilar template the forces of modernity and of late, the knowledge economy via the cyberspace as the most visible forms have generated new forms of patriarchy. Therefore we now have a rainbow of struggles to reclaim women’s space in all these domains that make a colorful mosaic. The challenges here are to give voice to the narratives which use very different categories that cannot be understood without the contexts and also cannot be fully reduced to writing and yet explore the varied cultural meanings of gender and gender differences. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-07-01,Sunkari Satyam,"Women Leadership and Panchayat Raj Institutions: A Study in Srirampoor and Chittapur Villages of Nizambaol District, Andhra Pradesh",Hardback,978-1-4438-2963-2,29.99,"The focus of this book is on grass root politics and women empowerment with special reference to the Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs) in selected study locations of India. At the grass root level, PRIs are supposed to play an important role in the welfare of marginalized sections of society such as Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and women. As an effective tool of public policy for proper implementation of PRIs, the 73rd constitutional amendment act came into force as a revolutionary step towards decentralization of power and governance. The introduction of the Constitutional (73rd Amendment) Act, 1992 marks a new era in India’s democratic set up and provides constitutional status to the PRIs. The present study aims at understanding the nature and impact of women leadership in the midst of traditionally dominant settings of rural leadership in the selected study villages. This book is useful for the planners, funding agencies, academicians, NGO activists, research scholars, students and development professionals working in the areas of rural development, PRIs, governance at grass roots and women empowerment in a broad context of public policy. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-09-01,D. Fatma Türe and Birsen Talay Keşoğlu,Women’s Memory: The Problem of Sources,Hardback,978-1-4438-3193-2,39.99,"Women’s archives appear to have been largely disregarded until the last couple of decades. Most countries lack well-documented archives, and the question of methodology has become a common concern and ever more significant for researchers. Aiming to contribute to the growing efforts of developing women’s archives, the present book brings together the works of numerous researchers from various disciplines. The researchers contributed to this volume in order to share information and experiences about the problems of sources and archives in women’s studies. The articles in the book not only analyse the problems encountered by researchers in the field of women’s studies, but also examine perceptions of women in collective memories. The book comprises five parts: Women’s Archives and Women’s Libraries; Art, Literature and Journal; Letters and Petitions; Oral History; and Cinema. All the articles present fresh ideas on the collective memory, perceptions, experiences, and the collection of documents on women. The aim is to present discussions about the works of oral, written, and visual culture that constitute the collective memory and to form accessible archives on an international level, thereby opening up new areas of research on this subject. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2011-12-01,Averill Buchanan,Mary Blachford Tighe: The Irish Psyche,Hardback,978-1-4438-3387-5,39.99,"The Irish writer, Mary Blachford Tighe (1772–1810), is best known as author of the Spenserian epic Psyche; or, the Legend of Love, first printed privately in 1805. A year after her death, her literary reputation was firmly established when Longmans published Psyche, with Other Poems (1811), a collection that proved so popular that by 1816 it was in its fifth edition. Throughout the nineteenth century Tighe’s popularity endured, but for much of the twentieth, Tighe, like many other women writers of the period, virtually disappeared from public view. Only since the 1970s, when feminist academics worldwide began the project to rehabilitate neglected women writers, has Tighe’s work become accessible once again. As a result, Tighe has been enjoying something of a scholarly renaissance. Yet much of this renewed interest relies heavily on nineteenth-century accounts of Tighe’s life and work, while her other unpublished work – several dozen short poems, as well as her manuscript novel ‘Selena’ – remains neglected. Taking its title from William Hayley’s reference to Tighe as the “Psyche of Ireland”, Mary Blachford Tighe: The Irish Psyche brings together previously overlooked archive material and makes extensive use of important new material to reconstruct Tighe’s life and review the entire corpus of her work in the context in which it was written. By piecing together evidence from family memoirs, correspondence, other contemporary accounts, and crucially, Tighe’s own manuscripts, the writer is restored to her historical and literary context, thereby facilitating new understandings of her work. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2012-01-01,Laurence Lux-Sterritt and Claire Sorin,"Spirit, Faith and Church: Women’s Experiences in the English-Speaking World, 17th-21st Centuries",Hardback,978-1-4438-3465-0,39.99,"Contradictions are legion when it comes to women and spirituality. In Christian cultures, the worth of the female sex is highly ambivalent, since virginity and motherhood are construed respectively as badges of purity and fruitfulness, whilst the biological processes which underlie them are considered taboo or impure. Throughout history, women are in turn represented as inferior, defective creatures or as privileged ‘empty vessels’ in their relationship with the divine. This polarized conception of woman has influenced the way in which religious institutions, learned writers, or indeed women themselves consider the female personal and collective relationship with the supernatural, with the divine, and with the institutions which represent it. Through eleven original essays, this volume questions how women from the English-speaking world have negotiated their roles in the spiritual and religious spheres. From early-modern Catholics and Puritan groups to twenty-first century nuns, Anglican ministers and Mormons, how did women define their roles in male-dominated institutions? How did they react to the public perceptions of their bodies as either incompatible with or facilitating access to the divine? The questions at the core of this book hinge upon the articulation between the female self (body and soul) and its experience of the preternatural, of faith, and of institutionalized groups. Are there specific forms of female spirituality and do they lead to a feminized/feminist conception of God? ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2012-01-01,Nursyahbani Katjasungkana and Saskia E. Wieringa,"The Future of Asian Feminisms: Confronting Fundamentalisms, Conflicts and Neo-Liberalism",Hardback,978-1-4438-3450-6,49.99,"This book on the future of Asian feminisms, confronting fundamentalisms, conflicts, and neo-liberalism is a critical contribution to the rising voices of Asian women’s studies scholars and activists. It is based on the ongoing research and advocacy work of the Kartini Asia Network, founded in 2003 in Manila. The five overlapping themes of the network are women/gender studies, fundamentalisms, conflicts, livelihood and sexuality. Considering that the economic and political weight of the region is growing fast, and that the 21st century has been named the “Asian century,” Asia is increasingly recognised as the continent to which economic, if not political power, will shift in the coming decades. The chapters brought together in this volume demonstrate the great diversity of the “transversal cultural flow” that women’s movements within Asia provide. Members of the Kartini network stimulate the articulation of a particular “Asian voice” in women’s studies and in the global women’s movement. Considering the existing patriarchal structures all over the continent, a continuum of oppressions enfolds, from the global sphere of market exchange to emerging fundamentalisms and to bitter conflicts and struggles around sexualities. The present volume provides elements for the critical dialogues that are needed between women in the region, between women and men, between people in all sorts of strategic positions, and between theoreticians in the Global South and the Global North to create a world in which human dignity is not eroded by predatory economic processes and in which democracy, diversity, pluralism, and inclusivity are the guiding principles of governance. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2012-01-01,"Susan Bracken, Andrea M. Gáldy, and Adriana Turpin",Women Patrons and Collectors,Hardback,978-1-4438-3464-3,39.99,"In looking at the history of collecting, one may be excused for regarding it as an activity in which, traditionally, women have shown little interest or in which they have not been involved. As the present volume shows, women—particularly aristocratic women—not only resisted this discrimination through the ages, but also built important collections and used them to their own advantage, in order to make statements about their lineage, power, cultural heritage or religious preferences. That is not to say that there was not an increasing number of middle-class women who became draughtswomen, painters and natural scientists and who found it equally beneficial for their chosen profession to collect. In every case, the female collector chose to collect and what to collect; she chose how and where to present the collection and she also decided when to dispose of objects, thereby occasionally taking on a curatorial role. Women have been seen as gatherers of furnishings, jewellery, dress and objects of domestic life. This third volume in the Collecting & Display series of conference proceedings challenges such perceptions through the detailed analysis of different types of collecting by women from the early modern period onwards; it thus seeks to give a voice to a group of important female collectors from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century whose importance for the history of collecting has not yet, or not sufficiently, been acknowledged. ","“This volume of collected essays on Women Patrons and Collectors expands on recent, often groundbreaking, research regarding female patronage of the (early) modern period which has shown that Isabella d’Este was not the sole patron among the aristocratic women of her time. Rather, noble women and members of the upper middle classes commissioned and collected works of art, for political and dynastic reasons they became donors of cultural and religious foundations and they became involved in the construction and embellishment of villas and palaces. The focus has long shifted from the simple justification of female patronage to the definition of quality. The introduction by Sheila ffolliott, herself a specialist in female patronage, opens the discussion that the seven contributors to the present Collecting & Display volume conduct carefully and convincingly. A rich bibliography and detailed index form a helpful scholarly apparatus and lay the foundations for future research. The essays include new research on the Florentine apartments of Eleonora of Toledo whose patronage has been the focus of much scholarly attention (Gáldy/La France). This example of the Italian Renaissance is followed by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century female patrons in England (Rowell/Aymonino) and Hungary (Bubryák). Collections of the ancien regime are examined using long-neglected parametres such as inheritance and dowries as well as conservation and curatorial activities by women of the high aristocracy (Zech). One contribution discusses the increasing interest in and investigation of naturalia by women (Kearney), while the participation of female art collectors is investigated well into the nineteenth century (Mansel). Such case studies are being complemented by discussions of the art market and how it developed according to gender – possibly as the result of the increasing strength and importance of the middle classes. The acceptance of a traditional dichotomy of male connoiseurship contrasted by a female domestic sphere continues to this day; it is the merit of volumes such as this to correct this image and to explain the influence of female collectors on the development of the arts and sciences and to which extent they were involved in the genesis of the modern museum.” – Dr Ilaria Hoppe, Institut für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin; Author of Die Räume der Regentin. Die Villa Poggio Imperiale zu Florenz “This new volume in the Collecting and Display series brings to the fore seven case histories of patronage and collecting by women living in various European countries from the 16th to the 19th century. The excellent introduction helps to bring together the large geographical and temporal span covered in this book by identifying important criteria for an understanding of women’s contribution. Women’s interest and involvement in the patronage and collection of works of art and precious objects are to be seen in conjunction with men’s activity in these areas, and fashioned by the same culture, motivations and justifications. There was indeed a ‘shared behaviour regardless of gender,’ and this book also explores some of the reasons why women’s important contribution has been marginalised throughout the centuries. Documentary evidence such as inventories, letters, diaries, prints, and even, in the case of Elizabeth Seymour Percy, a number of catalogues which she herself wrote, demonstrate the range of interests of these women, mostly wives of rulers, or belonging to the aristocracy, but also, in the case of the Netherlands, to the wealthy middle class. Their commissions, at times jointly undertaken with their husbands, ranged from buildings to the decoration and furnishing of their own apartments. Their collections comprised precious silverware, jewellery, Old Master paintings, and often included the fashionable natural curiosities which were kept in studioli, and exhibited together with small-scale portraits, medals, ivories and statuettes. All these objects and works of art demonstrate how many of these women were aware of their role within their blood and marriage families, which they celebrated by these activities.” – Paola Tinagli, author of Women in Italian Renaissance Art (MUP, 1997); co-author of Women in Italy, 1350-1650. Ideals and Realities. A sourcebook (MUP, 2005) ",Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2012-03-01,Reghina Dascăl,Episodes from a History of Undoing: The Heritage of Female Subversiveness,Hardback,978-1-4438-3611-1,39.99,"Episodes from a History of Undoing: The Heritage of Female Subversiveness (paraphrasing Rada Khumar’s seminal study of the development of the feminist movements in India: The History of Doing) is a volume purporting to illustrate women’s resistance to patriarchal colonization through societal norms and hegemonic discourses. Whether mythical amazons, mediaeval authors or regular cannonesses, Renaissance monarchs, activists and academics, philosophers or politicians, such women have become trail-blazers in their fields, attempting to forge new epistemes through strategies of undoing, refashioning, rewriting or revising political and cultural concepts, practices and institutions. The volume comprises 11 essays authored by academics from Brazil, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Turkey and the USA, and addresses a wide readership of academics, students, historians, NGO activists, etc. The volume is prefaced by Professor Margaret R. Higonnet from Connecticut University. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2012-03-01,"Sharon Collingwood, Alvina E. Quintana and Caroline J. Smith",Feminist Cyberspaces: Pedagogies in Transition,Hardback,978-1-4438-3633-3,44.99,"Feminist Cyberspaces: Pedagogies in Transition is a collection of essays exploring the ways in which new media technologies are being used in the feminist “classroom.” The collection has been structured to reflect the multifaceted nature of education today. Learning takes place on a personal level through independent study and social media; it takes place at a local level in our classrooms and lecture halls, but it is also increasingly taking place on a global scale as new technologies foster international collaboration between individuals and organizations. In addition, there is a growing acceptance of learning in the collaborative 3D classrooms of virtual worlds. These educational spaces are not mutually exclusive, as the contributions to this volume make clear. The anthology explores how technology is being used in antiviolence teaching, art education, HIV and AIDS education, and other specialized topics, but it also gives many examples of innovations in teaching introductory courses. The technology used ranges from the implementation of course management systems for large university classes to the use of digital storytelling in small groups outside the university. It also explores technology for removing barriers to people with disabilities in both traditional and online classrooms. The collection is not a “how to” book, but it does use practical experience as a basis for feminist theorizing of the classroom. All of the essays look at the use of new technology in the light of feminist pedagogy, seeking new ways to foster provocative, creative and non-hierarchical learning that transcends the physical boundaries of the university. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2012-03-01,Christine Bell,"Visible Women: Tales of Age, Gender and In/Visibility",Hardback,978-1-4438-3631-9,44.99,"Visible Women: Tales of Age, Gender and In/Visibility is a reflective, questioning, subjective, self-indulgent and moving narrative exploration of the experiences of women growing older and not disappearing. What lies behind stories of older women becoming invisible and disregarded? How true are they, where do they come from, and what do they mean? How might they be challenged, and what other stories can be told? The core of the book is the poetic representation of the thoughts and lives of a group of women between 50 and 70. Their narratives are drawn from the email correspondence between the author and her seven co-researchers. Starting with a search for the anecdotal and mythical ‘invisible woman’, the author’s own story is woven into, and becomes part of, the journey. The landscape – which is beautifully observed in clear, non-academic language – takes us through feminist and poststructuralist theory, existentialism, auto/biography, journalism, fictional writing, art, film, poetry and the internet. In ‘examining the bones’ of tales of invisibility, Christine Bell is motivated by indignation as much as curiosity. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2012-03-01,Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz,Women’s Identities and Bodies in Colonial and Postcolonial History and Literature,Hardback,978-1-4438-3627-2,34.99,"Since the second half of the twentieth century, there has been a commitment on the part of women writers and scholars to revise and rewrite the history and culture of colonial and post-colonial women. This collection intends to enter a forum of discussion in which the colonial past serves as a point of reference for the analysis of contemporary issues. This volume will examine topics of women’s identities and bodies through literary representations and historical accounts. In other words, the aim is to reconstruct women’s identities through the representations of their bodies in literature and to analyse women’s bodies historically as sites of abuse, discrimination and violence on the one hand, and of knowledge and cultural production on the other. The chapters of this book will contribute to the formation of a new representation of women through history and literature which fights traditional stereotypes in relation to their bodies and identities. Focusing on female bodies as maternal bodies, as repositories of history and memory, as sexual bodies, as healing bodies, as performative of gender, as black bodies, as migrant and hybrid bodies, as the objects of regulation and control, and as victims of sexual exploitation and murder, the different articles contained in this book will examine issues of space, power/knowledge relations, discrimination, the production of knowledge, gender and boundaries to produce new identities for women which contest and respond to the traditional ones. The volume is addressed to a wide readership, both scholars and those interested in investigating the dynamics of the female body, and the social and cultural conceptualizations of our multicultural and multiethnic contemporary societies in relation to it, without forgetting the historical and colonial roots of these new representations. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2012-04-01,Stephanie Laggini Fiore,The Heroic Female: Redefining the Role of the Heroine in the Tragedies of Vittorio Alfieri,Hardback,978-1-4438-3660-9,34.99,"The Heroic Female: Redefining the Role of the Heroine in the Tragedies of Vittorio Alfieri, fills a void in critical inquiry on the works of eighteenth-century tragedian Vittorio Alfieriperhaps the most important figure of the Italian Enlightenmentby exploring in depth the often neglected female characters and their function within the tragic structure. In this re-reading of the Alfierian tragedies, the author redefines the role of the heroine, and challenges traditional analyses that marginalize the female character and orient her to an abstract ideal characterized by fragility and tragic victimization. The author argues persuasively that, in Alfieri's search for psychological realism, he undermines traditional assumptions of gender roles by his modern portrayal of the tragic characters. The heroine’s different orientation towards reality endows her with intuitive and intelligent reasoning that contradicts eighteenth-century views of women as catalysts of anarchy and disorder. Alfieri’s tragic heroines are represented also as surprisingly independent and powerful. The resultant image of determined, active, and intelligent women refutes the traditional critical view. In exploring Vittorio Alfieri’s pre-modern sensibilities in the representation of his tragic heroines, this book is an important contribution to the growing body of critical works that study the representation of gender in post-Renaissance and pre-modern Italian literature. This book will be of particular interest to: Scholars of Italian lterature, especially the Enlightenment and Romantic periods. Scholars of 18th century European, American and other literatures Scholars of 18th century history and sociology. Women’s Studies and Gender Studies scholars. The Heroic Female: Redefining the Role of the Heroine in the Tragedies of Vittorio Alfieri, fills a void in critical inquiry on the works of eighteenth-century tragedian Vittorio Alfieriperhaps the most important figure of the Italian Enlightenmentby exploring in depth the often neglected female characters and their function within the tragic structure. In this re-reading of the Alfierian tragedies, the author redefines the role of the heroine, and challenges traditional analyses that marginalize the female character and orient her to an abstract ideal characterized by fragility and tragic victimization. The author argues persuasively that, in Alfieri's search for psychological realism, he undermines traditional assumptions of gender roles by his modern portrayal of the tragic characters. The heroine’s different orientation towards reality endows her with intuitive and intelligent reasoning that contradicts eighteenth-century views of women as catalysts of anarchy and disorder. Alfieri’s tragic heroines are represented also as surprisingly independent and powerful. The resultant image of determined, active, and intelligent women refutes the traditional critical view. In exploring Vittorio Alfieri’s pre-modern sensibilities in the representation of his tragic heroines, this book is an important contribution to the growing body of critical works that study the representation of gender in post-Renaissance and pre-modern Italian literature. This book will be of particular interest to: Scholars of Italian lterature, especially the Enlightenment and Romantic periods. Scholars of 18th century European, American and other literatures Scholars of 18th century history and sociology. Women’s Studies and Gender Studies scholars. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2012-04-01,Jamaluddin Aziz,Transgressing Women: Space and The Body in Contemporary Noir Thrillers,Hardback,978-1-4438-3662-3,44.99,"Transgressing Women focuses on the literary and cinematic representation of female characters in contemporary noir thrillers. The book argues that as the genre has grown, expanded and been subverted since its initial conception, along with the changing definition of gender, the representation of a female character has also inevitably gone through some dramatic changes. So, the book asks some important questions: What links the female characters in canonical noir to their contemporary counterparts? Is gender division still relevant in a text that transgresses gender boundaries? What happens when it is the human body itself that betrays the traditional definition or constitution of a human being? While many have written about the male protagonists and the femmes fatales in the noir genre, little attention has been given to the ‘other’ female characters who inhabit the noir world and are transgressors themselves. The main concern of the book is to trace the transgressive female characters in contemporary noir thrillers – both novels and films – by engaging itself with some of the most topical debates within both (post)feminist and postmodernist theories. The book is structured around two key concepts – space and the body. These temporal and spatial indicators are central in contemporary cultural theories such as postmodernism and post-feminism, along with other theorizations of gender and the noir genre. This means that the analysis is drawn from the classical noir examples and will then arrive at the neo-noir sub-genre, and then will move on to the most recent phenomenon in the genre, ‘future noir’. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2012-05-01,Jana Verhoeven,"Jovial Bigotry: Max O’Rell and the Transnational Debate over Manners and Morals in 19th Century France, Britain and the United States",Hardback,978-1-4438-3758-3,39.99,"This book revisits the debate over manners and morals that raged in France, Britain and the United States in the late nineteenth century. It was in essence a debate about gender and sexuality, and one of the foremost figures in the transnational discussions was the French writer and lecturer Paul Blouet, alias Max O’Rell (1847-1903). Although largely forgotten today, O’Rell deserves remembering as a major phenomenon of the fin-de-siècle publishing and entertainment world. A Frenchman living in England but catering primarily to the American market, he disseminated national and gender stereotypes in an unprecedented way. Admired for the wit deployed in his lectures and his many best-selling books, he is a colorful exemplar of the many bourgeois commentators, male and female, most of them with mainstream political, social and cultural views, who engaged in these discussions, producing dense webs of assertion and opinion across countries and even continents. The elegant French salonnière, the independent but trustworthy English girl, the bitter American spinster activist meddling in public affairs: these are just a few examples of the many caricatural representations of women thrust into the debate. Max O’Rell and his fellow observers commented on women’s position in family and society, their partnership in the couple, their education, their sexual fulfilment, their right to paid work, aspects of social etiquette, feminism, domestic abuse, adultery and prostitution. There were frequent disagreements and sometimes hostile exchanges, but this analysis of the debate reveals a fundamentally common outlook among its participants: an agreement on patriarchy as the foundation of bourgeois society, and on the necessity to confine women in carefully stereotypes roles. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2012-06-01,Josephine Dolan and Estella Tincknell ,Aging Femininities: Troubling Representations ,Hardback,978-1-4438-3883-2,39.99,,,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2012-06-01,RoseAnna Mueller ,Teresa de la Parra: A Literary Life ,Hardback,978-1-4438-3799-6,44.99,"This book is the first comprehensive study of Teresa de la Parra for English-speaking readers. The volume includes a biographical chapter and analyses of de la Parra’s two novels, Iphigenia: the diary of a young lady who wrote because she was bored and Mama Blanca’s Memoirs. An annotated version of the Three Colombian Lectures: Women’s Influence in the Formation of the American Soul reveals the importance of Latin American women’s contributions in Latin American history and speaks to gender issues sparked by critical reactions to Iphigenia. Translations of de la Parra’s selected letters, short stories, and entries from the “Bellevue-Fuenfria-Madrid Diary” provide a more complete picture of the writer and help tie her works to her life. The book reviews literary criticism on de la Parra, providing an overview of what Venezuelan, Latin American and American critics and biographers have to say about the author and her works. De la Parra bridged the gap between Venezuelan and European traditions, and this book examines the author’s contribution to Venezuelan and Latin American literary traditions while showcasing her as a model of Latin American women’s writing whose influence is being rediscovered and reevaluated. As RoseAnna Mueller tells us in her Preface, she happened upon Teresa de la Parra’s work quite by chance, something that is common to all of us who work with literature. Just as it happens to many of us, Mueller became enchanted by de la Parra’s work, and included it in her syllabus. But Mueller went further ahead, making De la Parra’s writings a subject of serious study, and the result is this book. For any person interested in becoming better acquainted with the literature of Latin America, this book is a must read: it brings an in-depth, careful reading of one of the most interesting and most original thinkers of the last hundred years. Through Teresa de la Parra’s lenses, as Mueller presents them, the reader will see how gender, race, and class are interwoven in the history of Venezuela and, by extension, of the whole continent. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2012-06-01,Katherine M. Quinsey,Under the Veil: Feminism and Spirituality in Post-Reformation England and Europe,Hardback,978-1-4438-3892-4,39.99,,,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2012-07-01,Develeena Ghosh,Shadowlines: Women and Borders in Contemporary Asia,Hardback,978-1-4438-3978-5,39.99,"Shadowlines: Women in Asia explores the often ambiguous and contradictory roles of Asian women in the postcolonial world. As globalisation advances, labour mobility is transforming traditional definitions of women’s work. The commodification of female sexuality in both the international and the national marketplace generates conflicting dynamics of oppression and liberation, as do the wider possibilities of employment and migration more generally. The consequences can be enslaving or empowering depending on context. How do the women themselves experience these changes? What are their opportunities for engagement with the wider political world which shapes these processes? In this volume a range of eminent academics address these questions by placing the testimony of individual women within the wider discourse of postcolonialism and gender studies. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2012-07-01,Sandra Ladick Collins,Weapons Upon Her Body: The Female Heroic in the Hebrew Bible,Hardback,978-1-4438-3980-8,39.99,"The biblical stories of Lot’s daughters, Tamar, Ruth and Bathsheba share much in common—singular women who are left to rely upon their own wits to achieve some measure of victory over the men around them. Scholarly interpretation of these women often reduces them to mere stock characters who inform civic notions about Israel, the perennial underdog who, like these women, achieves against great odds. Or, they reflect the trickery and moral ambiguity inherent in their line as ancestresses of the House of David. However, when read for their gender information (and not for what they can tell readers about Israel), one finds women who employ strategies of deception and trickery, motivated by individual self-interest, in order to successfully maneuver within the system to their benefit. Such initiative can be seen as valorous: they save themselves through their own pluck and ingenuity. Thus, a close consideration of these stories finds that heroic biblical women carry their essential weapons upon and within themselves in their drive, their resolve and their cleverness. Using methods from biblical study as well as folklore, this study identifies biblical women motivated by self-interest coupled with deception and an incidence of the “bedtrick,” an instance of sexual trickery that challenges the text’s power and gender dynamics. This identification puts Lot’s daughters, Tamar, Ruth and Bathsheba in league with female heroes from folk tale and legend. By contrasting and comparing common motifs and actions with traits established by other non-biblical female heroic narratives, strong heroic themes are located in all four narratives. This offers a dynamic argument for identifying the female biblical heroic. This work concludes that this new identification of heroic women in the Bible profoundly affects further interpretation of the Bible. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2012-08-01,Jamila A Chowdhury,Gender Power and Mediation: Evaluative Mediation to Challenge the Power of Social Discourses,Hardback,978-1-4438-3983-9,44.99,"The book investigates the practice of family mediation and some of the challenges that may hinder its effective use by marginalised groups in a society. Those challenges include gendered power disparity and family violence, especially towards women, and the discussion extends to how the challenges can be overcome through a practice of evaluative mediation to provide fair outcomes for women. Unlike other contemporary books on mediation, this book not only discusses different theories of power and equity in mediation, it also includes a number of verbatim quotes from different mediation sessions to demonstrate how those theories are operationalised in a real life context. While other contemporary texts on mediation focus on Western style facilitative mediation and its limitations in attaining fair justice for women enduring gendered power disparity and family violence, this text emphasises an evaluative mediation style that is embedded in Eastern social practices. Instead of focusing on gendered power disparity and family violence as limitations on the practice of facilitative mediation, this book details the practice of evaluative mediation which may provide fair justice to women despite the presence of gendered power disparity and family violence in a society. ",,Cambridge Scholars Publishing